


The Beginning of the End (aka Squicky)

by Josselin



Category: Queer as Folk (US)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-12-03
Updated: 2003-12-03
Packaged: 2018-01-11 14:01:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1173920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Josselin/pseuds/Josselin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack Kinney and Jennifer Taylor get married. Justin, so wee and so brave. Brian, so fucked.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Beginning of the End (aka Squicky)

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Сквик (Начало конца)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7761541) by [analgin13](https://archiveofourown.org/users/analgin13/pseuds/analgin13)



> Author’s Note: There are almost too many people to thank; I really hope I’m not forgetting anyone. Julad for the original idea and outlining help. Starla, Wrenlet and Sisabet were all involved with massive further outlining help and dialogue. (Starla deserves extra credit for saving the fic from potentially being very bad.) Dr. Dawn provided medical and legal advice for realism. Wrenlet and Cait were excellent betas and my non-fannish friend J. helped to catch some last typos. Also, a huge thanks to everyone who read Squicky as it was being written and encouraged me on with so much fantastic feedback. I seriously wouldn’t have finished without all your support.

When Brian Kinney was twenty-five years old, his father got remarried to some blonde high-society bimbo. Brian pretty much ignored the whole process. As he told Jennifer Taylor when she came to visit and introduce herself a week after the engagement was announced to him (in a drunken phone call from his father), he hadn't needed a fucking mother twenty years ago when his died, and he didn't fucking need one now, so she could just take her little chocolate cake and get the fuck out of his apartment.

Jennifer had given a nervous glance to the naked guy leaning up against Brian's couch and Brian's own half-dressed state, made a final gesture with the cake, and turned around to scurry down the steps.

Brian slammed the metal door to his loft shut behind her and turned back to his fuck du jour, and didn't give Jennifer a second thought.

He showed up at the wedding because his friend Michael pretty much forced him and because it was a good way to get free drinks. Michael paired him up with Lindsay and sent the two of them off together as a perfectly matched set, which meant that he had to endure his father's little speech about how blondes could catch even those who weren't meant to be family men, and how Brian should watch his back that way.

After frequenting the bar repeatedly, he gave Lindsay the keys to his Jeep and left with a really hot caterer.

The real problems didn't start until the next morning, when Claire called him. Bad things always happened when his sister called.

Brian was hungover, and squinting, and wincing at the whining tone in Claire's voice, and not really making out what she was saying. It was something about red itchy spots, and that was really more than he wanted to know. Ever.

"Why the fuck are you calling me?" Brian cut in finally.

"You have to go over to Dad's to watch the kid," Claire said.

Brian flung back his duvet and stared at the clock. Fuck, ten o'clock on Sunday morning was too early to deal with this shit.

"What kid?"

"Our new step-brother. Jennifer's kid."

"Oh yeah," Brian vaguely remembered something about that.

"He was supposed to come over to stay with me during the honeymoon, but now John's got the chicken pox, and I guess Justin's never had them, so his mother doesn't want him to be exposed, so Jennifer was going to cancel the trip, but Daddy really wanted to go, so he decided that you could watch Justin for the week."

Brian walked over to the kitchen, rolling his eyes at Claire. "Uh huh."

"Their flight leaves at three, so you should get over there right away so Jennifer can show you all the kid's medication and everything."

"He's sick?" Brian said. "No way am I gonna spend a week with some fucking sick kid."

"No, he's got allergies or something."

"Look, they'll just have to find someone else," Brian said firmly.

Somehow, that didn't explain how he ended up knocking at the door to his father's house an hour later. The door was answered by Jennifer Taylor, who looked perfectly coiffed as usual, and seemed vaguely nervous about leaving her little baby with Brian for the week. Brian smirked and figured that with a few carefully placed phrases, he could get out of this babysitting job yet.

* * *

It was an awkward hour. Jennifer half-heartedly went through lists of the kid’s allergies--he was fucking allergic to everything from grass to oranges to dust to wheat to Tylenol--and tried to figure out a way she could avoid leaving her son with him for a week. Brian wanted to tell her that just because he was gay didn't mean he was a fucking child molester, but he wasn't sure he wanted to break the news of his queerness to his father if Jennifer hadn't mentioned it yet, and he rather wanted Jennifer to chicken out and not leave the kid with him anyway. Maybe, Brian pondered, he should sort of elaborately leer at the kid while Jennifer was watching, to make her extra nervous.

Apparently the kid was about as excited about the new marriage as Brian himself was, and was pouting in his new room--which just happened to be Brian's old room. The kid didn't come downstairs until Jennifer finally went up to get him, still eyeing Brian skeptically.

Once Jennifer was getting the kid, Jack hauled the bags out to the sedan, and gave Brian a wink, and some talk about how much he was gonna enjoy his honeymoon. Brian tried to avoid gagging, and made some sort of noncommittal statement about all guys liking sex. Brian was pretty sure that his dad’s entire buddy-buddy act was going to lead up to a request for some cash--"Just a few dollars to spend on the vacation, you know?"--but apparently the one good thing about this marriage was Jennifer's income as a real estate agent, which lifted his father comfortably above the poverty line.

The kid was short and sullen, and quite obviously pissed off at his mother. He had the same blond hair his mother had, which was maybe an argument for hers actually being real, and not the product of some highbrow salon. But instead of her picture-perfect hairstyle the kid's hair was all tousled and mussed up, and Jennifer tried to fuss over him with a comb while he whined and shoved her hand away.

Somehow, and Brian still isn't sure how this happened, he and the kid ended up standing in front of the window, staring at his father and Jennifer driving off to the airport. Neither of them were waving, Brian because he was still kind of in shock, and the kid because he was still quite obviously pissed off at his mother, who did in fact wave to him worriedly from the car window.

After the car turned right at the end of the block and disappeared out of sight, Brian turned away from the window to look at the kid. He figured he might as well tell the kid how it was gonna be right away, to avoid trouble later on.

"Look," Brian said. "You don't want to be here; I don't want to be here. So we can both do each other a big favor by just kind of pretending that neither of us are here, all right?"

The kid looked at Brian with narrowed eyes, and then stomped back upstairs without saying anything. Brian took that as a yes.

Brian sat down at the kitchen table with his laptop and tried to get some work done, since he realized that now he'd have to leave the office early for the rest of the week to pick up the kid at school. Ryder wasn't going to like that. Ryder was going to chew his ass off for that, actually. Maybe the kid could walk home a couple of days. Or join some sort of after school activity that might last until seven at night, which was about the time the Granger account might stop calling him for the evening.

The kid stayed upstairs in his room, doing whatever it was thirteen-year-old kids did in their rooms. Probably he was jerking off or something. Brian had a momentary vision of the kid staring at straight porn and women with giant boobs, and he shuddered--the kid was probably polluting his room as Brian sat there downstairs. It was too horrible to think about.

So he pushed it out of his mind and got some bullshit work done, and the kid wandered down again around dinner time to forage for food. Sure, Brian figured. Kids are always hungry. Hopefully this one was going to grow soon, and a lot, or he was going to be in for a hard life.

The kid's searches through the cupboard appeared mostly unproductive, though he had set a bottle of ketchup and a box of Cheerios out on the counter, for reasons Brian wasn't too sure he wanted to think about.

"You hungry?" Brian asked.

The kid rolled his eyes. "Duh."

Brian blinked, and was silent for a moment. "You like Chinese food?"

The kid nodded.

"Grab one of the menus from the drawer under the phone," Brian told him, and the kid did, pulling the squeaking drawer open and sorting through the junk inside.

Brian took the menu the kid fetched for him, and then made the kid go bring him the phone as he decided what to order.

"I want an egg roll," the kid announced, handing Brian the cordless, and so Brian ordered one.

After dinner the kid seemed to be in a much better mood and stayed downstairs to bug Brian instead of going back upstairs.

"Don't you have homework or something?" Brian said finally, exasperated.

"Nope," the kid said, sitting down the kitchen table and kicking the table leg repeatedly, which shook Brian's laptop screen just that little bit and drove him nuts.

"How can you not have any homework on a Sunday night?" Brian demanded.

"'Cause I'm smart, and I already finished it all on Friday night," the kid said, smugly.

Brian refrained from mentioning that doing homework on a Friday night made the kid a complete nerd, and tried to come up with another distraction. "Don't you have friends or anything that you could go play with?"

This seemed to be a sore spot for the kid, who got a sour look on his face and didn't say anything, but began to kick the table just a bit harder.

"What grade are you in, again?" Brian asked.

"Eighth," the kid said. "I wanted to skip a year, but mom said that would be bad for my social development, which was already impaired by my traumatic reaction to my parents' divorce."

Brian rubbed his forehead. "But you don't have any friends anyway."

The kid glared at him. "I could be in high school right now," he said defensively. "I'm smart enough."

"Sure you are," Brian said. "But you're too short to be in high school."

The kid responded to Brian's accusations about him being short by sticking his tongue out. "I turn fourteen next week," he said.

Brian just looked at him, and then raised an eyebrow.

"If you don't want to think up a present to get me, cash is always nice," the kid continued.

"Don't fucking expect a present from me," Brian said.

"You have to get me a present," the kid said calmly. "I'm your stepbrother now. It's page three in the 'completely bogus new family relations handbook'--must buy expensive gifts for new relatives on all occasions."

Brian raised both eyebrows, and the kid nodded seriously. "If you don't get me a present," the kid continued, "probably I'll have to cry a lot to my mom about how traumatic this remarriage has been. Maybe I'll run away to New York and never come back."

"Well," Brian said, considering, "if you run away, that'll probably save all the rest of us a lot of trouble."

But the kid had already moved on to a new subject, standing up to peer over Brian's shoulder at his laptop. "What are you doing?"

"Work."

"What kind of work?" the kid asked, leaning his elbow on Brian's shoulder.

Brian shook him off irritably. "Boring work. Not fun for little boys. Go play."

"I'm not little!" Justin protested.

Brian just snorted.

Eventually, it became clear that Brian would not be able to get rid of the kid until he found him something to do, so he ended up taking the kid in the Jeep and driving over to the video store. Then the kid got all excited because he could rent R-rated movies that his mother wouldn't let him watch.

Brian started to eye a redhead with a really nice ass and the guy seemed to be checking him out in response, but then Justin came up and started asking Brian questions about whether he'd ever seen the third Batman movie, and the redhead migrated over to the Disney section of the store, and that was really kind of disturbing.

"Get whatever you want," Brian told the kid, "just don't fucking talk to me about it."

The kid finally ended up picking The Matrix and some freaky anime film, and Brian slapped both cases down on the counter and pulled out his card. They went back to the house and Brian half-ignored the kid as he babbled on about Japanese animation techniques.

"Yellow Submarine is my favorite movie," he said finally.

Brian didn't say anything and turned left when the arrow came.

"What's your favorite movie?" the kid asked.

Brian ignored that question as well, and hoped the kid would take a hint.

He didn't. "What's your job?"

"I'm in advertising," Brian said shortly.

"Really?" the kid asked excitedly. "Do you like make commercials and stuff? Would I have seen any of them?"

"I only make commercials that appear in front of R-rated movies," Brian said.

Justin sighed. "Do you have a girlfriend?"

Brian didn't say anything and contemplated fiddling with the radio, but that was maybe too obvious.

"I saw you with that girl at the wedding reception," Justin continued. "She was pretty." The kid stared out the window for a moment, and then kept talking. "I had a girlfriend, once. For like two weeks. But it screwed my life up."

"Girls do that," Brian said.

"Yeah," the kid sighed yet again, and Brian glanced over at him, and he looked pretty fucking morose. "She was my best friend, you see? Daphne? And it was great and all, but then she got this crush on me, so finally I was so sick of all her friends asking me if I liked her all the time that I asked her out, and so we were like...girlfriend/boyfriend, for a few weeks, but Daphne always wanted to hold hands, and then she tried to kiss me, and her friends kept giggling all the time, so I had to break up with her. And now she doesn't speak to me anymore," the kid concluded glumly.

Brian didn't know what to say to that, so he turned the radio on.

* * *

They got back to the house and the kid made microwave popcorn and put his anime movie in, and Brian went back to his work in the kitchen, but eventually found himself unplugging his laptop and drifting over to join the kid on the couch.

"This is stupid," Brian proclaimed.

The kid gave him a look like he had just profaned the holy church or something. Brian pointed at the screen. "Their mouths totally don't match to the words their saying. Even ignoring the whole subtitles thing. And that's the dumbest dialogue I've ever read in my life."

Then the kid got all defensive and went into an impassioned speech defending the great art that they were watching. Brian decided he needed a cigarette to deal with this kind of pressure, and fished a pack out of his coat, which was still lying over the back of the couch. The kid's lecture trailed off as he saw the pack of cigarettes, and he stared at Brian with big eyes. Brian pulled a lighter out of his pocket. "What?" he asked, holding the lighter poised near his lip, the cigarette dangling from his mouth.

"You smoke?" The kid said this with a shocked tone, as though Brian had just revealed he was a mass murderer.

Brian lit the cigarette and figured that was enough of an answer for the kid. Unfortunately, Jennifer's arrival in Jack's life seemed to have gotten rid of the ashtray that used to rest on the coffee table, so Brian appropriated a little golden-edged teacup sitting on the end table instead.

He let the kid lecture him on the horrible dangers of smoking for five minutes before he interrupted his little public service announcement. "Look, if I want to kill myself smoking, then that's my business, so fuck off."

"But you're going to kill me, too," the kid said frantically. "You're smoking in the house, and the second hand smoke will get me, which is worse, because it's not even filtered. Plus," the kid started to give really fake sounding coughs, "I'm allergic."

Brian gave the kid a look. "You're not fucking allergic." He took the cigarette from his lips and held it out to the kid. "Here, try a drag." The kid eyed the cigarette hesitantly, as though it might just kill him any second. Brian rolled his eyes and gave the kid a little smirking smile. "I promise it won't kill you."

But after a long pause, the kid tried a drag of the cigarette, and then he really started to cough, and ran off to go brush his teeth and find his inhaler or something while Brian snickered on the couch.

* * *

The week passed quicker than Brian anticipated that it would. On Monday he drove the kid to school in the morning, trying not to keep grinning at the image of the poor kid swimming in his geeky, oversized uniform. The kid said he stayed late after school for art club, and that was perfect since Brian needed to work until at least five before he could come pick him up. Ryder was being a bastard about the Granger account, but Brian won over the new McCormick account in their lunch meeting, so Ryder could just go fuck himself. Brian was aiming for a bigger office by spring--something with large windows.

After he picked the kid up from school and listened to him chatter about reading Lord of the Flies on the way home, he dropped the kid off at home with strict instructions to do his homework and go to bed by ten, and went to pick up Mikey to go to Woody’s.

Michael got a real kick out of him taking care of a kid for a week, and wanted to hear all about the wedding, which Brian hadn’t paid attention to in the first place.

“God,” Michael said. “It must be pretty bad to be stuck with a whiny little brat all week.”

Brian snorted. “Actually, he kind of reminds me of you.”

Michael made a noise of indignant protest.

“No, really. He’s always talking about cartoons and shit.”

Michael gave Brian a look, trying to determine whether Brian was serious or just kidding with him, but then Brian got distracted by a guy walking across the room, and got up from his seat. “Duty calls,” he told Michael with a little wave, approaching the guy, whispering in his ear, and then heading for the bathroom with the guy following right behind him.

When Michael dropped him back at the house after midnight he almost tripped on the porch steps, and started cursing about how he wasn’t back at the loft as he fumbled with the lock. Brian finally got the door open, and was greeted with the sight of the kid, in flannel pajamas, sitting on the couch munching microwave popcorn and watching The Matrix.

Brian closed his eyes briefly, then opened them again, and the kid was still there, with the remote and bowl of popcorn in his lap. “What the fuck are you doing?” Brian said.

The kid didn’t even look away from the screen. “Watching a movie.”

Brian closed the door behind him and locked it. “Didn’t I tell you to go to bed by ten?”

“Mmm…” the kid said distractedly. “I can’t remember.”

Brian looked around in a circle, as if exasperatedly searching for someone to come to his defense. “I fucking told you to go to bed,” Brian said.

The kid looked up at him now, still looking completely unconcerned in the face of Brian’s anger. “So?” the kid said, enjoying Brian’s stunned drunken silence. “What are you going to do to me if I don’t?” He asked this with his eyebrows raised and the most irritating smug smile Brian had ever seen.

Brian walked around the couch, turned off the television with a click on the remote he grabbed from the kid's lap, and then leaned over close enough so that he could smell the popcorn on the kid's breath. The kid still stared at him brazenly. "Three things," Brian said. "If you don't do what I say, there will be no food and I will not drive you to school. I will, in fact, take you over to Claire's house, and you can get itchy red spots just like your new little cousins. And, I will turn you over my knee, and spank you so hard, you won't be able to sit down for a week." He paused for a moment, just breathing in the kid's face, and was pleased to see Justin swallow nervously. "Is that clear?" he asked finally.

Justin nodded.

Brian straightened up and stepped back. "Upstairs. Now." And the kid scrambled for the stairs. Brian smiled. Parenting wasn't so bad, really.

* * *

On Tuesday morning, Justin was subdued, or maybe just over-tired from staying up too late. Brian was grumpy and had a crick in his neck from sleeping on his father's couch for the second night in a row. Brian wasn't sure what the kid had for breakfast, but he left a box of Cheerios and a bottle of ketchup on the counter behind him until Brian forced him to go clean it up.

He stayed home that evening, and Brian pointedly told himself that it was *not* because he was checking up on the kid to make sure he did what he was told, but it was definitely because if he didn't write some memos to whip ass over in marketing, then all his work on the Granger account would be for shit. Justin sat across from him at the table and worked silently on his homework, kicking the table leg the whole while until Brian wanted to scream.

The next day was Wednesday. On Wednesday nights Brian always ate with the guys at the diner, and he saw no reason to let the kid interrupt his routine, so he dragged him along. Justin was ridiculously excited about getting to go out to eat.

Two unanticipated things happened after Brian parked the Jeep and took the kid walking down Liberty Avenue to the diner. First, the kid's eyes bugged out taking in all the sights, and Brian thought he was going to have to bodily pull the kid away from where he was standing, shell-shocked, staring at two men making out in a doorway. Brian found this thing rather amusing, and smirked at the kid's naivete.

The second thing was that the kid started to get a lot of eyes from other guys walking down the street. It seemed like all the men checked the kid out and then raised an eyebrow at Brian, with an implicit question about whether the kid was any good or not. Perhaps this had all been a mistake. Brian glared at anyone who checked the kid out, and after half a block that seemed like eternity, they were finally at the diner.

Michael and Emmett were already sitting next to each other in a booth, so Brian pushed the kid in across from them and sat down himself. Now it was Emmett's turn to raise an eyebrow at him, but Michael guessed it right away.

"Hey, is this your new step-brother?"

Brian nodded. The kid was still staring, open-mouthed, at the diner decorations, and seemed to be particularly fascinated by a drag queen in the next booth over.

"Hi," Michael said to Justin, who didn't seem to notice, still staring around. Brian elbowed the kid to call his attention back so he wouldn't embarrass anybody.

"Brian," Emmett drawled, "I didn't know you were getting new relations out of this whole wedding deal. And such cute ones, too."

Brian leaned back in the booth and handed the kid a menu from the side of the table. "He's off limits," he told Emmett dryly.

"Why, have you claimed him?" Emmett said sarcastically to Brian. "You're a real sweetie," Emmett told Justin.

"Uh, thanks?" Justin said. Emmett smiled at him.

"Emmett," Michael said. "What are you doing? The kid's like ten years old."

"I am not!" Justin protested indignantly. "I'm fourteen."

"Next week," Brian corrected. "You're fourteen next week."

"What?" Emmett said, raising his hands in the air. "I'm just saying he's adorable. What's your name, sweetie?"

"Justin."

They were saved, or perhaps doomed, by Debbie's sudden arrival at their table.

Deb fussed over Justin like he was the only child she'd ever seen come into the diner before, and after she'd already stuffed the boy with french fries, she brought him a giant ice cream sundae. Brian had to make sure there were no nuts on it, since the kid was allergic to nuts.

Emmett made conversation with the kid about various topics, and Michael tried to talk to him about comic books until Justin proclaimed firmly that "Comic books are for geeks," at which Brian snickered.

The thing that pleased Brian most about the evening was that he managed to talk Emmett into staying with the kid while he and Michael went to Babylon. Before he left, though, he bent down to whisper in Justin's ear. "If you're not in bed when I get home, there'll be hell to pay."

Justin looked slightly resentful at being abandoned, but he really did seem to like Emmett, so Brian didn't feel guilty at all, merely relieved, since he was really fucking horny.

He felt much better after clubbing, as though the stress was just lifted off of him, and he was in a very pleasant mood until he got back to the house and noticed that every single fucking light in the whole place was on. So either the kid had forgotten to turn them off, or he was still awake, and either way, Brian was not happy.

He stalked around the lower level, switching everything off, and then proceeded upstairs, where he heard music coming from his old room. The door was locked, but he jimmied it--it'd been his room, after all--and barged in.

The kid was sitting on his bed, and looked up, panicked, when the door opened. He had a notebook or something in his lap, and no less than three lights on in his room, and the radio on.

"I'm in bed!" the kid said immediately.

Brian was not amused and paced around the room, glancing at all the kid's stuff. The room certainly looked different now than when he had had it. He hadn't had any stupid anime posters, that was for sure.

"Why are you not asleep, then, like all good little boys should be?" Brian demanded, looking over all the kid's books on his hutch above the desk.

The kid looked away to avoid his eyes, and Brian made a mental note about this as a sign of the kid being a bad liar. "I couldn't sleep."

"And why is that?" Brian flopped down to sit next to the kid on the bed.

The kid sighed and didn't say anything, but Brian could make a wild guess from the way he was acting.

"Please don't tell me you're afraid of the dark."

The kid stared at the wall and bit his lip.

"You are scared of the dark," Brian surmised.

"No," the kid protested. "I just get a little freaked sometimes."

Brian sighed. "Well, unfreak out, and go to sleep."

The kid changed the subject. "Why didn't you tell me you were gay?"

Brian raised an eyebrow. "Is it any of your business?"

Justin shrugged. "You could have told me. I won't tell anyone."

Brian snorted. "Who would you tell?"

The kid stared down at his lap, which called Brian's attention to his notebook, which seemed to have a drawing in it. He suddenly remembered the kid was in art club.

"What are you drawing?" he asked, reaching for the notebook. The kid grabbed at it and clutched it to his chest.

"No!" he said.

Brian raised an eyebrow. The kid flushed. "It's not very good. I'm not finished yet."

Brian stood up next to the bed. "Fine. But go to sleep now." He watched as Justin set his notebook on the nightstand, closed it carefully, put away his pencil, and pulled up the blankets over him. Brian clicked off the stereo and flipped the light switch.

"G'night," Justin mumbled sleepily.

Brian stood in the doorway, and watched the kid in the darkness. "Night," he whispered.

* * *

On Thursday, the kid called Brian at work, and through a lot of babbling and pay-phone static, Brian managed to gather that the kid had made up with his little girlfriend and was going over to her house after school and so Brian wouldn't have to pick him up.

He promptly put the kid out of his mind and turned back to his client.

When he got back to the house at seven he was starving because he'd skipped lunch, so he thought he'd suggest ordering a pizza to the kid. Brian thought the kid would probably like that, if he wasn't allergic to cheese and tomatoes.

But when he got in the house--really, when he'd pulled up in front and not seen any lights on, if he'd been paying attention--he realized that the kid was not there.

Brian had a moment of something--some feeling that was definitely not disappointment and was probably more like hunger--and then he shrugged and ate some cereal instead. Then he sat down on the couch and began to surf the channels but nothing good was on, and one Brad and Bob's commercial's was polluting channel four, so he turned off the TV and stalked around looking for something else to do.

By nine o'clock he was pretty fucking pissed off. Of course the kid hadn't given him a number for his friend or anything, and how was he supposed to fucking psychically know the girlfriend's last name so he could use the fucking phone book, and why did the kid not fucking call him to come pick him up?

He pushed Justin out of his mind and took out his laptop and read some articles in between furious games of solitaire. At ten, he found Jack's stash of whisky.

* * *

When they got into the Jeep the next morning the February air was icy cold, and Brian turned on the heater but all that did was spray cold air at them faster. Even as the heater started to actually produce warm air, the temperature in the Jeep didn't seem to rise much.

"Look, I said I was sorry!" Justin burst out finally, holding his backpack on his lap and toying nervously with one of the straps.

Brian made a very sharp left turn and didn't say anything.

"But I didn't know, I mean, I do that all the time, and how was I supposed to know you didn't have Daphne's number, and..." he trailed off.

Justin sighed. "I'm sorry you were all worried."

Brian gritted his teeth. "I wasn't fucking worried."

Justin snorted at that and turned to look out the passenger window. "Then why did you care, if you weren't worried about me?"

"I cared," Brian explained, his voice hard, "because if you get dead because you froze to death outside and get kidnapped by mobsters, I'm the one who'll go to jail for being negligent."

There was silence for a while.

"Uh oh," Justin said suddenly.

Brian could feel a headache coming on.

* * *

The kid had forgotten his homework in the printer tray, so Brian had to drop him at school and then drive back to the house and get the little social studies assignment and then drop it off at the kid's school, which was teeming with really disturbing little things in uniforms. Plus, the office secretary tried to flirt with him.

And he was late to work, which Ryder really wasn't pleased about.

The day didn't get any better, either. When it was finally over, all he wanted to do was go to Babylon and fuck his brains out, but he had to go pick up the kid at Daphne's house, because they were not going to go through that whole thing again.

After being forced to make small talk with Mrs. Chanders while Justin put on his shoes, Brian was about to explode. Drastic action was necessary. So he when they got back to the house, he called Lindsay. She was a woman, even if she was a lesbian, and all women liked kids. Especially blond ones. And this one wasn't bad looking or anything.

He hid out in the laundry room so the kid wouldn't hear him, and then he begged Lindsay, to please, please come watch the kid, for just one evening, because he was going to die if he didn't get a break right now.

Well, he didn't put it quite like that. But Lindz really was soft-hearted and so impressed by the fact that he had watched his step-brother for a whole week that she agreed pretty easily. Half an hour later she arrived on the front porch with a scrabble board and a plate of cookies. Brian greeted her with a kiss, and he could see the kid eyeing the two of them suspiciously from the living room, probably wondering if he was leading Lindsay on or something.

Whatever. He couldn't think about that right now. He had to go out. He abandoned the kid to the oatmeal cookies (after making sure Justin wasn't allergic to any of the ingredients) and scrabble, and peeled out of the driveway in the Jeep.

* * *

He came home not *too* wasted so that Lindsay wouldn't give him the evil eye, and found the two of them all cozy up at the kitchen table with a bunch of sketchbooks spread out all over the place.

"Brian," Lindsay greeted him. "Justin is quite the little budding artist here."

"Is that so?" Brian asked disinterestedly. Lindsay rolled her eyes.

"We'll have to meet again soon, sweetie," Lindsay told Justin, kissing his forehead. "And I'll show you some tricks with the watercolors."

Justin walked her to the door, talking excitedly about some kind of pencils or something, and Brian took that opportunity to sneak over to the table and look at the kid's drawings while they were all spread out.

* * *

Finally it was Saturday, and Jack and Jennifer pulled up in the driveway. Jack was wearing a fucking ugly new cowboy hat and carried in a bunch of black luggage looking disgustingly satiated and pleased with himself. Jennifer fussed over Justin and seemed relieved that he didn't look obviously molested or anything.

Brian escaped out the front door as soon as possible, ignoring the kid waving behind him.

And Brian thought that would be the end of it. That should have been the end of it. He'd done his good deed, Claire now owed him big-time, and it was over and he could go out on Saturday night without a second thought.

But that wasn't the end of it at all. That was only the beginning...

* * *

Three weeks later, when Michael and Deb were visiting Vic in New York for the weekend, Brian spent Friday night hanging out with Ted and swore that he was not going to do the same thing on Saturday, so somehow, after a long session at the gym and a nice shower, he found himself driving over to his father's place. It was still cold, being March, but warmer than it had been for a long time.

Not knowing what to do but feeling weird under the over-bearing eye of the new Mrs. Kinney, he invited the kid to go to the park with him to play catch.

This was a mistake. There might have been less coordinated people on the planet, but Brian had never met any of them.

Brian could toss the ball underhand, slow as possible, and have it hit the kid in the chest, and he was still unable to catch it.

The kid tried really hard, though, and was frustrated by his utter lack of coordination, so finally they stopped and Brian flopped down to lie in the grass and pulled out a cigarette. This time it was the kid who asked if he could try a drag, and he only coughed half as much.

After that, he took the kid to a bookstore and told him he'd buy him a book as a belated birthday present, and if it wasn't already quite clear that Justin was a complete dork, the amount of excitement he demonstrated at the prospect of getting to pick out a book would have given it away.

Brian noted that the kid's book had a lot of pictures of naked guys in it. Of course, it was a book about art, and there were a lot of naked women, too, but still.

And that was how it went, for a while. He'd drop by whenever Michael and the guys were busy, and take the kid to a movie or play X-box with him, and sometimes, on a rare occasion, he'd even find himself blowing off Michael to go get the kid, because really, the kid didn't talk about anime *that* much.

Brian kind of got off on how the kid worshipped him, utterly and completely, and the kid was pathetically willing to lap up any amount of attention that Brian gave him, since he really didn't have any other friends besides Daphne, who had now decided to take up piano and was busy practicing a lot.

Eventually, Jennifer even seemed to sort of adjust to his presence, relaxing into the idea that he wasn't going to molest Justin, and then she started to encourage the two of them to do things, because she felt that Justin needed more "male influences."

Having a little brother turned out to be vaguely fun.

One summer afternoon they were escaping the heat in the air conditioning of Justin's room--Brian's old room--lying on the bed and staring at some old comic books Justin had found in Brian's closet. Justin was chattering about the art, which he thought was okay, but not up to his high standards. Brian was staring at the ceiling and just kind of enjoying doing nothing.

Justin stopped babbling, and turned to stare at Brian for a moment. It took a moment of quiet before Brian lifted his head up.

"What?" Brian asked.

"What's it like to have sex with other guys?" Justin asked.

Brian let his head flop back down on the pillow. "Uh. Sticky."

"Sticky?" Justin said incredulously. "What?"

Brian nodded.

"Well, have you ever had sex with a girl?" Justin asked.

Brian nodded again.

"What was that like?"

"Mmm. Stickier," Brian decided.

"You are like," Justin said, shoving Brian's shoulder irritably, "the worst older brother ever. Older brothers are supposed share long stories about their sexual conquests, full of elaborate detail for inquiring minds. And all you can say is that it's sticky. How am I supposed to learn anything about sex?"

Brian sat halfway up on the bed, and grinned at the kid. "I'll buy you some porn," he offered.

* * *

Jennifer got the great idea that, for maximum male bonding, Jack and Justin should go camping together in late June, which was ridiculously hot that year.

Brian went along to make sure Justin didn't get abandoned in the woods and eaten by a bear or something while Jack was passed out drunk.

Of course, Brian took his own bottle of whisky along, too, but it's best not to think about these things too much.

They left early on a Saturday morning, because, as Jack said--far too chipperly for Brian, who'd been at Babylon only three hours ago--the early bird gets the worm. Brian personally felt that it was the faggot who stayed up late who got the most cock, but he didn't share that thought with his father, who really wouldn't have appreciated it.

Jack had brought his rifle along with the intention of teaching Justin how to be a man through hunting, but the three hour public service announcement on the emotional cruelty to animals due to hunting and the potential for human injury and the danger of private ownership of firearms on the drive to the campsite convinced Jack to leave the gun in the trunk. Brian spent the whole ride half falling asleep and fighting the urge to snicker.

They arrived at the campsite, and Jack sat down to have a drink before battling to put the tent up. Justin immediately spotted the lake, and decided he wanted to go swimming off the pier. Brian vetoed that idea because now the sun was high in the sky, and the kid was sure to get sunburned. "We didn't bring swimsuits," Brian pointed out.

Justin rolled his eyes. "We can swim in our underwear," he argued. "It's not like there's anyone else around."

The kid did have a point, Brian had to concede, as the campsite was completely deserted and the lake was still.

Brian managed to convince the kid that they could swim later in the day, after the water had warmed some and the sun wouldn't be quite so harsh, and they went back to help set up the tent.

* * *

Jack appeared to have already fought a battle with the tent and lost, judging from the assorted tent pieces scattered about the site and the amount of whisky gone from the bottle.

Now, Jack was nowhere to be found, and neither was the car.

"What the fuck?" Brian trailed off, somewhat shocked that his father would actually abandon them in the woods.

"Maybe he went to the bathroom?" Justin suggested tentatively.

"With the car?" Brian asked incredulously. "And there *are* no bathrooms. Go introduce yourself to a tree, kid."

"Well," Justin said. "Maybe he went to get food."

"Maybe," Brian said sarcastically, "he went to go shoot himself, and will save me the trouble."

The kid rolled his eyes at that and pulled a sketchbook out of his bag, sat down on a stump, and started drawing. "I still want to go swimming later," Justin reminded Brian.

Brian stood in the clearing, shaking his head slowly, and then decided that as long as his father wasn't around, there was really no reason not to pull that joint out of his pocket.

"Yeah," he said in response to the kid, around the joint he was lighting in his mouth, "We might be swimming for a long time, so don't hold your breath."

Justin looked up from his sketchpad. "That's the dumbest saying I've ever heard," he complained. "And you're mixing metaphors, so it didn't even make any sense."

Brian had thought it was kind of clever, so he scowled at the kid.

"What are you smoking?" Justin asked finally. "It smells funny."

* * *

Brian endured the kid's horrified PSA on the evils of marijuana for like three minutes before shoving the joint in his mouth. That shut him up pretty fast.

Shortly, they were both lying on the grass in the middle of the clearing, staring up at the sky, looking the clouds, and giggling periodically.

"That cloud looks like a fat woman riding on a hippopotamus," Brian said, pointing at one off to the right.

Justin looked over at it. "It does not," he retorted.

Brian closed one eye and bit his tongue. "Yes, it does," he maintained, staring at it determinedly.

Justin heaved a mighty sigh. "I still want to go swimming," he complained. "I'm hot."

"No swimming while intoxicated," Brian said, shaking his finger at Justin.

Justin pouted.

"And no setting up the tent, either," Brian continued.

"I don't know how to set up tents," Justin said. "Hey, that cloud looks like an alligator."

Brian squinted at it. "No, it looks like two guys fucking."

* * *

By around one Brian noticed that the kid's face was starting to get kind of pink, so he dragged him over into the shade, and that put an end to the cloud watching. They played cards, instead.

First they played a few rounds of blackjack, until Justin proclaimed that to be utterly stupid. Then Justin tried to explain the rules to some other card game that he claimed was "the coolest," but either he was still high or the card game was fucked, because Brian could not understand how it worked for the life of him, and kind of suspected that the kid was just making it up.

Then the scrounged around for some food, but since the cooler had still been in the car when Jack took off, all they had was two granola bars. And, of course, the partially full bottle of whisky.

This gave a new urgency to their situation.

* * *

Justin ate one of the granola bars, but they saved the other one for later. Brian started to worry about how likely it was that a park ranger would come along before they starved to death, but he estimated that really, they were only a mile or two from the main road, so it wasn't like they were going to die or anything. He was in favor of heading for the road right off, but the kid really wanted to go swimming and who was Brian to deny him?

Brian sat on the pier to act as a lifeguard, and the kid stripped down to his underwear and then jumped into the water.

"Careful!" Brian shouted, and the kid popped up again, screaming from the cold. "You didn't even know if there were rocks there or anything."

The kid rolled his eyes, treading water. "It's a lake, not a cliff."

"What if it had been really shallow?"

"If it were shallow," Justin said, "then I would've been able to see the bottom and I wouldn't have jumped."

Brian scowled and pulled out a cigarette.

"Don't smoke," Justin said, tugging on one of Brian's feet that were dangling in the water. "Come swim with me."

"I don't *do* lakes," Brian said.

Justin got a mischievous grin on his face, and Brian tried to snatch his foot away two seconds too late, because by then he was already sliding into the water, and it was fucking freezing.

He had an advantage over the kid, though, because he was just tall enough to touch the bottom with his head above the water, while the kid had to tread water. Brian used this advantage to dunk the kid several times, but it was ineffective punishment, because the kid was laughing and giggling and loving it.

"My clothes are all wet now," Brian grumbled finally.

"Aww," the kid said, hanging onto Brian's shoulder to avoid having to tread water and acting all fake-sweet.

And Brian turned his head to look at the kid, whose face was right there, just inches from his, and he was suddenly viscerally aware that Justin wasn't really wearing any clothes.

He shrugged the kid off his shoulder sharply, leaving him to bob in the water, and pulled himself up onto the pier, ignoring the kid's protests behind him.

"Get out of the water so you don't drown," he called behind himself, refusing to let himself look back to see the kid scramble onto the pier, denying himself a look at Justin's almost-naked body.

He stalked back to the campsite, wrung his clothes off as best he could while they were still on him, and then began to gather up all the pieces of the tent and pile them in a heap. He grabbed the deck of cards and the kid's sketchbook, and threw them in his bag.

"What are you doing?" Justin asked tentatively.

Brian looked up, and the kid was still undressed, clutching the bundle of his clothes in front of him. "Put your fucking clothes on," Brian said gruffly. "We have to go find the car."

* * *

They walked up the road. Brian set a fast pace, as fast as he could go in uncomfortably wet clothes, but then he was forced to stop every few minutes and wait for the kid to catch up with him.

Fortunately, they didn't have to walk real far. A mile up the road they found the car in a patch of grass on the right side of the road, and Jack was in the driver's seat, snoring loudly.

Brian shook his father's shoulder. "Hey, Pop," he said. "Time to get up."

Jack was flustered at being found in this condition and tried to hide his embarrassment by asking why Brian was all wet.

"Fell in the lake," Brian said. "Hand me the keys."

Brian and his father had an understanding that they never talked about the embarrassing things his father did while intoxicated, just like they never talked about the scars Brian had from his father's belt. It wasn't an understanding they had ever discussed or anything, but they both knew about it.

The kid didn't know about it, of course, so as they drove back to the campsite to pick up the tent, he started to ask questions.

"Shut up and look out the window," Brian said. And the kid did.

* * *

So the three of them got back from their aborted camping trip rather early, and Brian refused Jennifer's offers to put his still damp clothes in the dryer in favor of going back to his loft right away to escape the kid's questioning eyes.

He kind of avoided his father's house for a bit--not that he admitted to himself that he was avoiding it, but hell, he had better things to do than hang out with his family, that was for sure--but somehow, a mere two weeks later, he found himself back over there for a Fourth of July barbecue.

Two beers and twenty minutes of Claire's whining brats later, he had no idea why he'd come, and headed off towards his Jeep to get out of there. Justin ran up behind him and caught his arm.

"Where are you going?" Justin asked.

"Someplace else," Brian answered, still walking towards the car. Justin tagged along beside him.

"Take me with you," Justin begged. "Don't leave me here with John--he keeps burping at me."

Brian stopped in the middle of the front yard, looked at Justin for a moment, and then turned back towards the Jeep. "Go tell your mother," he said.

Brian was sitting in the Jeep when the kid came running back, and he pulled away from the curb while Justin fastened his seat belt.

This was when Brian made his mistake.

He took the kid over to Debbie's because Deb was also having a barbecue for the Fourth, and he knew that Mikey and Emmett would be there, and probably Ted, too, if he wasn't visiting his mother.

Once they got there he found Emmett sitting on a lawn chair drinking something with a little umbrella in it, and he left the kid there with Emmett while he went off to go find Michael. He never should have done that.

He didn't realize the mistake right away, of course, because when he came back and found Emmett busy regaling the kid with stories of his youth in Hazelhurst--what it was like when he came out to his mother, how sad he was when his puppy was run over by an ice cream van, how the other kids called him a sissy, his uncle Herb's favorite kind of salad dressing--and all other sorts of Southern bullshit that Emmett liked to spout, the only thing Brian worried about was that Emmett might kill the kid of boredom.

Far from it, of course. Justin was staring sort of slack-jawed at Emmett and listening to his stories as though they contained the secrets of the universe. So Brian ignored them both, and threw water balloons at Ted.

But later, looking back, Brian ignored all of his own conversations with the kid, ignored all the hints he'd had from the kid all along, and decided that the whole thing was definitely Emmett's fault. Fucking Emmett.

* * *

It happened on a Wednesday.

Brian was over for dinner, and the four of them--Jack, Jennifer, Brian and Justin--were all sitting around the kitchen table, eating fried chicken and mashed potatoes and corn on the cob.

And then, suddenly--and Brian had no idea why the kid chose that moment over any of the others--Justin set down his corn on the cob on his plate, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and made his announcement. “I’m gay,” he said.

Jennifer gave Justin a worried look, Brian looked at him sharply, and Jack turned from his chicken to say, “What?”

Justin repeated himself. “I’m gay.”

“Maybe we should talk about this later,” Jennifer started tentatively, but Jack cut her off.

“What the hell kind of joke is that supposed to be?” Jack demanded.

Justin stuck his chin out stubbornly. “It’s not a joke. I’m telling you all, I’m gay.”

“Honey,” Jennifer said, wiping her fingers on a napkin and reaching out to pat Justin’s arm, “you’re too young to make these kinds of decisions--”

“It’s not a fucking decision,” Brian cut in sharply. “If he says he’s gay, he’s gay.”

Jennifer looked at Brian, and he looked back at her, and it was all right there in her eyes, that she felt Justin’s ridiculous obsession with his step-brother had suddenly gone too far, because now it was obvious that Brian had turned Justin gay.

Jack banged his hands down on the table. “I want to know what the hell is going on here,” he shouted.

Jennifer and Brian ignored him, and Justin only gave him a brief glance.

“Justin,” Jennifer said, “sometimes, when you’re young, and influenced by other people,” she didn’t say Brian, but she might as well have for all the little glances she was giving him, “you might think things--”

“For fuck’s sake,” Brian interrupted again. “The kid knows his own mind, okay? He’s young, but he’s not stupid.”

Justin looked gratified. “That’s right. And I know I’m gay.”

Jack stood up and by now he was red in the face with fury. “There will be no fucking fairies in my house!” he bellowed.

In that moment, Brian was closer to coming out to his father than he had ever been before.

But the moment passed, and Brian didn’t say anything.

The evening degenerated into a series of small arguments. Justin was sent to his room, Jack yelled a bit more while Jennifer tried to placate him. Brian followed Justin upstairs. He jimmied the lock on the kid’s bedroom door to let himself in and slammed the door again behind him. Justin was sitting at his desk, playing some game on his computer, and looked up defiantly when the door opened, but relaxed into a smile when he saw that it was Brian.

Brian shook his head, slowly. “That was fucking stupid,” he told Justin.

Justin looked surprised by this response, as though he had been expecting Brian to be happy for him and throw him a coming out party or something. So fucking naive. In the face of Brian’s disgust, though, he quickly grew indignant. “I’m not going to lie about it,” Justin protested.

“There’s a difference between lying and making your life a living hell,” Brian told him. And a living hell the kid’s life was going to be now, if the volume of Jack’s yelling was any indication.

Justin got that stubborn look on his face again. “Is that what you tell yourself when you’re too chicken to come out?”

Brian walked forward, slowly, and if the kid knew him well enough, he would have seen the dangerous glint in Brian’s eye. “Is that what you think?” Brian asked softly. “That I’m too chicken to come out?”

Justin swallowed, but he held his own, lifting his chin to look Brian in the eye steadily. “Yeah,” he said, daring.

“Fuck. You.” Brian said, turning around. “You don’t know shit about me, and don’t kid yourself that you know shit about being gay, either, no matter how many of Emmett’s stories you’ve listened to.”

Brian left, slamming the kid’s door behind him, and he was about to follow his father in leaving to head to a bar when Jennifer cornered him in the hallway.

“Look, Brian,” she said, smoothing her hair nervously. “I think,” she said, and he stared at her, waiting for her to spit it out. “I think it’d be best if maybe you didn’t see Justin for a while.”

Brian nodded, slowly, with one hand on the door knob. “Uh huh,” he said, his brow furrowing.

“It’s just,” Jennifer struggled to explain, “obviously Justin’s confused, and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and he’s been struggling with the divorce, and the marriage, and…” she trailed off, wringing her hands.

“And maybe a few more sleepovers with Daphne will set him straight again,” Brian finished dryly.

Jennifer sighed, and looked like she might be about to do more justifying, but all she said was, “I just think it would be for the best. For Justin.”

Brian nodded again, still staring away from her at the door, and then he opened the door and stalked out to the Jeep.

* * *

It was two weeks before Brian saw Justin again after the kid came out over the chicken dinner. But then, one Thursday evening, there was a knock on the loft door and when Brian opened it expecting to see Lindsay come to bug him about her whole baby idea again, it was Justin, instead.

Brian had already been drinking, and answered the door holding the bottle of vodka he had discovered in his bathroom. He frowned at his uninvited visitor, but the kid squirmed under his arm and into the loft, looking around with great interest.

"Does your mother know you're here?" Brian asked, wondering if he had any orange juice left from the last time he made mixers.

"What?" Justin said, startled from his contemplation of the naked man painting. "No, of course not. She thinks I'm at Daphne's."

Brian nodded, slowly, and stuck his tongue in his cheek. "And here I thought lying was beneath you," he said dryly.

Justin didn't seem to notice the hit, and Brian's attempts to get him to leave failed. Somehow, he eventually found himself relaxing with a joint and letting the kid put in a movie.

He had seen the film a hundred times before, but Justin hadn't because it was an old one, and so while Justin was enraptured in the screen, Brian found himself enraptured by the kid, sneaking glances at his face and his dick in between shots of vodka.

Luckily, the movie was distracting Justin from what would have normally been a big PSA on binge drinking.

Later, Brian decided it was all Michael's fault, because really--of all the evenings for him *not* to show up.

Brian wasn't quite sure if it was the liquor, or the drugs, or the way the light from the television screen flicker on the kid's face, but just as the good guy was riding off into the sunset, he leaned in close to Justin on the couch, and touched his lips to Justin's.

At first, it was just a touch, a brush, really, but then Brian was suddenly angry at the kid, and used his tongue to part Justin's lips and thrust inside, using his lips to say to Justin, so you're really gay, are you? Let's see just how gay you are.

And the kid was supposed to protest, and push at his shoulders to get him to back off, but he didn't. Justin opened his mouth eagerly, squirming closer to Brian on the couch, and reaching his hands up awkwardly to rest on Brian's neck and shoulders.

So then Brian shoved him away, and stood up next to the couch, swaying a little bit from the vodka, and yelled at the kid. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?"

The kid was supposed to backtrack like Michael always did in these situations, and say something about it being the drugs, or the beer, or a dream he'd just been having about someone else, or really fucking late at night, or otherwise giving Brian an excuse to forget about it, but he didn't. He sat there, looking vaguely confused, and said, "You kissed me. I kissed you back."

"Fuck!" Brian shouted, pacing off towards the bathroom and waving his arms in the air. He turned back to the couch. "Fuck," he said again. "Get out," he told the kid. "Now. Get the fuck out of here."

When he finally got Justin out of the loft, he slammed the door behind him. And the next time the kid tried to visit, Brian slammed the door in his face.

* * *

Brian swore, after that night, that he was going to forget that the kid even existed.

This turned out to be easier than he anticipated, because that weekend Michael showed up on his doorstep. When Brian asked if he was ready to go to Babylon, Michael started crying.

Brian frowned at him because he hated it when Mikey got all teary-eyed, but Michael ignored that and threw himself into Brian’s arms, sobbing.

Brian found his voice, finally. “What’s wrong?” he asked gruffly, his arms finding their way around Michael slowly.

Michael pulled his face out of Brian’s neck and wiped his eyes with one hand. “It’s,” Michael hiccupped, “It’s Uncle Vic. He’s,” Michael kept stammering and it was hard to understand him. “He’s positive,” Michael said finally, “and it’s bad. It’s full-blown, Brian--”

“Fuck,” Brian said, cutting Michael off by pulling him into a tighter hug and cradling Michael’s head into his neck again, feeling Michael’s tears against his skin. “Fuck,” Brian said again, softly, and the word was full of emotion.

The next days were filled with Michael crying at the loft in Brian’s arms, and weeks went by in a blur of phone calls to the hospitals in New York, of blood tests--because Michael was sure, absolutely sure that he and Brian were positive, too, and how was Brian to contradict him when he hadn’t been tested in three years?--of paying the mortgage on Deb’s house while she was off of work and Vic was out of work, and of course, work was a whole separate matter.

They lost the McCormick account, and Ryder was pissed because they didn’t get a couple of new accounts he’d been aiming at, and that meant there were layoffs, and because Ryder was an asshole idiot, that meant that Vicky and Mark were laid off, while Brad and Bob the moron twins somehow remained at the company, and all this meant that somehow Ryder expected Brian to produce the work of about four different people, all for the same salary he’d had the previous year--since, yeah, cut-backs meant no salary ups, either.

It felt as though Brian didn’t have a single spare moment left to think, and if he had a single dream once about a blond boy sucking him off, generous application of alcohol before going to sleep seemed to help that and all of his other problems.

Christmas came, and Michael was in New York with Deb and Vic, but they were hoping that once Vic was stable they’d be able to bring him back here. But Michael was gone, and Lindsay and Melanie were trying to brave the holiday with Lindz’s parents, and Brian was left alone, on a day when the office was closed and there was no way he’d get any work done. He found himself getting a box out of the closet. He set the box on the counter in the kitchen, and looked at the two anime DVDs he’d bought on a business trip to Japan a few months ago.

He stared at them for a few minutes, and then he dumped all the crap tissue paper from the bag of stuff that Lindsay had given him for Christmas, shoved the DVDs in the holiday bag, grabbed a bottle of champagne, and headed out to the Jeep.

Not even Jennifer could deny him the right to visit his own father on fucking Christmas, Brian thought, but surprisingly enough, when he pounded at the door, and she answered, she actually looked genuinely happy to see him.

Maybe it was just that he had brought alcohol with him as a present--he knew what kind of gifts the Kinneys appreciated.

There didn’t seem to be all that much Christmas cheer in the Kinney household. His father was already somewhat wasted, and was sitting in his fucking ugly recliner watching football on television. Brian spared him a nod and couple of words, and then allowed himself to be ushered into the kitchen and offered some coffee by Jennifer. She offered some Christmas cookies, too, but he turned those down.

She made pleasant small talk with him for a few minutes, and he was puzzled at why he suddenly seemed to be her favorite person when the last time he’d seen her she’d pretty much kicked him out of their lives.

After fifteen minutes of bullshit and coffee, he gestured to the bag he’d set on the table and said, “I brought a present for Justin.” He wondered if she’d insist on checking it out first or something, just to make sure he wasn’t giving the kid sex toys or something.

But she just nodded encouragingly and said, “Oh, I’m sure he’ll like that. He’s upstairs in his room--why don’t you go on up and give it to him?”

Brian eyed her suspiciously, wondering if maybe she’d been turned into a pod person, but he stood up, grabbed the present, and headed up the stairs.

He knocked on the kid’s door and waited. “Go away,” the kid called sullenly. Maybe Santa hadn’t brought him everything he was hoping for, Brian figured.

Brian cleared his throat. “I brought you a present.”

There was no answer to that, but a minute later, the door latch clicked, and then the door began to slowly drift open. Brian pushed it open further, and saw the kid walking back to his desk, with his back to Brian.

Brian followed the kid and flopped down on his bed. He held the Christmas bag out towards the kid’s back. “I brought you a present,” he repeated.

Justin turned slightly to look. He didn’t reach for the bag, though, so eventually Brian stretched out his arm a little further and set the bag down on the kid’s desk.

Brian lay on the bed and the kid sat at his desk, staring at the wall and pouting.

“So did you get a lot of good loot?” Brian asked, when the silence became too painful.

“Shut up,” the kid said grumpily.

Brian sighed. “Look, are you pissed at me?”

“Yes,” Justin said, giving Brian a ‘duh’ look, and imbuing his tone with disgust.

“Well,” Brian said, with a fake-sweet smile, “you can either get over it and fucking open your present, or you can keep pouting there and I’ll take it back.”

The kid gave Brian an irritated glare, but then Justin reached for the bag and sullenly pulled the DVDs out. He wanted to stay mad, Brian could tell, but the kid’s grudge-holding capabilities didn’t hold a chance against the latest episode in his favorite series, and he smiled reluctantly.

Brian grinned back at him, smugly, and the kid looked back at the DVDs, and then he said, “This is the one where Zor fights with the evil dragon lady!”

Brian nodded.

“I’ve been wanting this one forever!” Justin said.

Brian nodded again, because yeah, he’d heard about how much Justin wanted this forever, too; for months it had been like all the kid talked about.

And so Brian was forgiven, at least sort of. He was pleased that the kid didn’t say anything about the kiss, but maybe he was just too busy rambling on about Zor now, caught in non-stop anime babble.

Brian was about to get up and head out the door, when the kid pointed out something on a Zor poster across the room, and Brian suddenly got a good glimpse of Justin’s whole face.

“What the fuck happened to you?” He interrupted the kid’s spiel on Zor’s magic sword by stalking over and grabbing the kid’s chin to get a good look at his black eye.

Justin lifted a hand up to touch his eye gingerly, as if to confirm that yes, it was indeed still bruised. When he touched it, he winced slightly. "What does it look like?" Justin said sarcastically.

"It looks like you got punched in the face," Brian said.

Justin huffed out a breath of air. "Well, if you're going to tell me what a wimp I am, I've already heard it, okay?"

"Who fucking punched you?" Brian demanded.

Justin shrugged, escaping Brian's grip on his face, and crossing the room to go rummage for something in his closet. "Does it matter?"

It did matter, of course, but Brian couldn't find the right way to say that, so he just kind of stood there. Finally, the kid re-emerged from his closet search and sighed. "Look, it's hard to be the smallest kid in the high school locker room, okay?"

Brian noted that kid didn't actually say that he got punched in the locker room, which was good because Brian would have called him on that lie--there was no way that bruise was more than two days old, and Jennifer had mentioned that Justin'd been off of school all week for Christmas break.

But Brian gave the kid a break. "Yeah, I bet it is," he said sarcastically. "Especially if the other guys catch you staring at their dicks." The way the kid tensed at that was a sure sign of guilt on that score.

"I wasn't!" Justin protested indignantly.

Brian stuck his tongue in his cheek and nodded. "Uh huh. Sure you weren't."

"I wasn't!" Justin said again.

"Knowing you," Brian continued, "you probably got out a sketch pad and asked them to pose for you."

The kid was completely red in the face now. "No!" he said, sort of irritably shoving at Brian, and then the argument degenerated into a big tickling fight until they both ended up flopped on the bed, catching their breath.

"Just tell me you didn't come out there, too," Brian said finally, and the kid's silence was probably enough of an answer to that question. Brian sighed. "Try to exercise some self-preservation, okay? I don't want to go to your funeral. I look horrible in black."

Justin giggled, and shoved at Brian's side half-heartedly. "Liar. You look great in black."

Brian couldn't actually contradict that, but he didn't want to get into it; it was too close to talking about whether or not the kid found him attractive.

The situation was rapidly going places Brian didn't want it to anyway, because Justin rolled over on the bed and snuggled into Brian's side, resting his head on Brian's chest and wrapping an arm over his chest.

Brian tensed at first, but then, when the kid didn't make any further advances, he started to relax, until he pictured what would happen if Jennifer walked in at that very moment. Then he was about to squirm away and get up when the kid gave a soft little sigh, and said, "Sometimes I wish you were really my brother." He squeezed the arm around Brian's chest. "You know? And that you lived here with me all the time."

And then Brian didn't know what to say.

* * *

Of course, Brian had not forgotten about Justin’s black eye.

He spoke with Jennifer and Jack, and from what Justin, Jennifer, and Jack said--or really, more accurately, from what they all didn’t say--he managed to piece together what had happened. It went like this:

The last day of school before Christmas break, a locker room scuffle erupted over something and Justin got violently shoved into a locker. It might have stopped there, except then, apparently, Justin kicked the guy who stuffed him in the locker in the groin. Guy screamed a lot, and teachers were alerted. All members of fight were taken to the principal’s office.

Then, the principal’s secretary called Jack and Jennifer, and the other guy’s parents, and they all had to go in for a little conference about fighting in school. Both kids were suspended for two days, so Justin’s Christmas break just got a little longer. Jennifer was all upset about Justin getting hurt and suspended, but Jack immediately objected to the fact that Justin hadn’t “fought fair,” and why’d he let the other guys shove him in a locker in the first place?

So Justin spent the first couple days of his Christmas break moaning on the couch until the bruising on his back got a little better, and then he was up and about more, eating Christmas cookies and shit. Jack’s little talks about how much of a sissy Justin was did not abate, and on Tuesday night, apparently, he said that it was all Justin’s fault in the first place, and it was good that “fucking fairies got what was coming to them.”

At this, Justin apparently stood up and told Jack that actually, “Most instances of homophobia stem from deeply repressed latent homosexual desires,” and then wham!--Jack belted him.

Brian was actually kind of impressed that his father could have even caught the meaning of a sentence that contained that many big words, but probably Justin’s tone--and Brian could just imagine the tone the kid would use for that pronouncement--told Jack all that he needed to know.

Jack talked a lot about how uppity the kid was, Jennifer seemed more worried about Justin getting suspended than about him getting hit by his step-father, and all in all, Brian was starting to get a bad feeling about this.

On the plus side, he got invited back soon on all accounts. Jack wanted him to come over more often to do manly things, probably to reassure himself that he managed to produce at least one genuinely male offspring that he could belch and watch football with to affirm his heterosexuality. Yeah, well, Brian was just going to have to pass on that. Jennifer, on the other hand, invited him to come over any time for dinner, or tea, or whatever, and he got the impression that she was vaguely frightened of Jack and kind of liked the idea of having Brian around to try to diffuse situations. Justin wanted him to come over more to help him try out all the new X-box games he got for Christmas.

At first Brian tried to only come over when he knew that Jennifer, at least, was going to be around, and he tried to keep the kid downstairs by the television, playing X-box or something, instead of letting Jennifer shoo them up to Justin’s bedroom. But eventually Jack tired of having Justin always watching anime when he wanted to see a game, so another television appeared in the basement, along with a really old ratty couch with one cushion missing. The X-box and DVD player got moved down there too, to sit on a cardboard box. The basement smelled like mildew and something about it set a bunch of Justin’s allergies off.

The basement was no better than the bedroom, really, particularly in terms of cuddling and sex-talk potential, so then Brian started just coming over for dinner, and tried to ignore the kid playing footsie with him under the table and Jennifer drinking kind of disturbing quantities of wine.

Then Brian realized he was acting like a teenage girl.

So he fucked all of that, and showed up on a Saturday when he knew Jennifer was going to be out showing houses all day. He was Brian Fucking Kinney, he could tell one fifteen-year-old kid--and Justin would let no one in a two-mile radius forget that he had just turned fifteen--to get lost. He told hundreds of guys to get lost every day; this should not be any harder.

It was, though, somehow. Mostly it was just that the kid would not fucking give up, but as time went along he was starting to get sneakier, too.

He had started off with the logical arguments, which were easy for Brian to just snort at and ignore.

Justin: I want to have sex.  
Brian: So go have sex.  
Justin: I want to have sex with you.  
Brian: Too bad.  
Justin: But I want to have sex.  
Brian: So go have sex.  
Justin: I need you to participate.  
Brian: No you don’t. There are hundreds of guys in Pittsburgh you could get to have sex with you.  
Justin: But I don’t know any of those guys.  
Brian: Well, that’s flattering.  
Justin: No! That’s not what I meant.  
Brian: Uh huh.  
Justin: I want it to be special. I know you’d make it special for me.  
Brian: Go jerk off.

Then Justin tried the complimenting/sucking up approach, telling Brian how hot he looked in those jeans he was wearing. Brian just grinned at the kid and shook his head, and Justin swore frustratedly.

If Brian didn’t visit for a few days, the kid would figure out a way to see him, too, either by just showing up at the loft, or by calling and inventing some excuse. The most creative was when he insisted he needed Brian’s help with his geometry homework, but it was quite clear that this was a load of bullshit because the kid totally knew geometry and really just wanted a chance to try to grope Brian under the desk.

Justin was sexiest when he wasn’t trying, and when he managed to catch Brian off-guard. There was one evening when Brian decided to celebrate the arrival of a rug in the Kinney basement by teaching the kid the basics of fighting--he fucking needed some education, that was for sure.

Somehow, the fighting became wrestling on the new rug, and the wrestling became squirming, and pretty soon Brian was grinding against Justin’s hip before he even realized what was going on.

The kid was out of the house more, too, probably trying to avoid Jack in the same way Brian used to. But while Brian had hung out at Michael’s and the diner, Justin spent a lot of time at Daphne’s watching girly cartoons and spent the rest of it over at Brian’s loft, which severely curtailed the number of tricks Brian could bring home. Not that the kid would mind if Brian showed up with a trick; in fact, he’d probably enjoy watching quite enthusiastically, but Brian really didn’t want to go there.

One evening, Brian arrived at the Kinney house in time for dinner--it was easier to get Jennifer to cook for him than go to the diner, which just reminded him that Deb and Michael still weren’t around. Well, Deb wasn’t around, and Michael was around, but not around--he was in Pittsburgh but working double shifts for extra cash, even with Brian helping Debbie out.

So he came for dinner, but as he walked up to the front door Jack came storming out, ignoring Brian completely on his way to the sedan in the driveway. Brian watched him pull away, and then went into the house. Jennifer was sitting, shell-shocked, at the kitchen table--no dinner in sight--and so Brian went upstairs.

The kid wasn’t in his room but the light was on in the bathroom, so Brian stormed in there, and took note of the way the kid flinched when the door opened.

Justin was standing there, shirtless, wincing in front of the mirror and trying to get a good look at the red marks on his back.

There was a moment when the two of them just stared at each other, and then Brian turned Justin around, using gentle hands to inspect what were going to be some pretty awesome bruises.

“Do you have a heating pad?” Brian asked. Justin shook his head. “Hot water bottle?” Justin shrugged, then winced from shrugging.

Brian considered going downstairs to try to get Jennifer to help out by finding a hot water bottle, but that seemed kind of hopeless, so he decided to work with what he had, and turned on the water in the tub to start running a hot bath.

“Take off your pants,” he told the kid.

Justin did, moving awkwardly from the pain, but he left his underwear on until Brian smirked at him with a raised eyebrow.

Then, blushing, the kid stripped off his underwear, but held his hands protectively in front of his groin. Brian snorted, and batted the kid’s hands away to get a good look.

When he finished his inspection, he looked up at Justin, who was blushing furiously but giving him a kind of challenging, expectant look.

“Don’t fucking fish for compliments,” Brian said. “Get in the tub.”

* * *

Brian told Ryder to go screw himself and took Monday morning off to go corner Jennifer at her real estate office.

She gave him coffee in a little white styrofoam cup.

Brian cut to the chase. "You have to fucking do something."

Jennifer acted all uncomfortable, sighing and looking out the window and shrugging helplessly. "If Justin would just try not to *provoke* him so much..."

"Don't fucking give me that," Brian snapped. "It's not his fault. It's yours, because you're his mother and you're not getting him out of there."

"Look," Jennifer said, "I just can't, I... I'm trying to keep everybody happy and--"

"Random beatings are not making Justin happy. Why haven't you fucking filed for a divorce?"

Jennifer wrung her hands. "I can't. Look what it did to Justin last time, I can't put him through that again..."

Brian snorted. "That's a fucking lame excuse and you know it. Why?"

Jennifer swallowed. "It's really not my place to tell you this," she started, "but last month, we--Jack and I," she clarified. "They told us--" She kept hemming and hawing until Brian thought he was going to strangle her. "Jack has cancer," she got out finally.

Brian sat back in his chair.

"And I just can't leave him, now, to be alone with that, because he needs someone to help him out, and I mean, he's dying, and who could just leave a dying man?"

Brian stared at his folded hands for a moment waiting. "So a few bruises for your son is a bargain, when you consider the life insurance pay-off," he said acidly.

Jennifer was flustered. "It's not that, it's just..." But she didn't seem able to say what it actually was.

"I'll talk to Justin," Jennifer offered finally. "I'll try to see if he can just...tone it down, a little, around Jack, just try not to get to him quite so much. And Justin likes it so much when you're around, he just adores spending time with you--"

"What about Justin's father?" Brian interrupted.

"Craig?" Jennifer said, startled.

"Maybe Justin could go live with him for a while," Brian suggested.

Jennifer laughed weakly at that suggestion. "I think, after the phone call Justin made to Craig to announce that he's gay, that living with him would hardly be an improvement."

Brian was forced to eventually leave her office without a clear solution to the problem, but he put it out of his mind in order to wrap up the Rensel account that afternoon.

At seven o'clock, he leaned back in his chair, and had two thoughts.

First, he was hungry, because he had skipped lunch.

Second--his father was dying.

He dealt with the first problem by stealing a Snickers bar out of Cynthia's desk, and dealt with the second problem by heading over to the Big Q.

He couldn't find Michael on the floor in the store, so he eyed products in the baby food aisle suspiciously--why were they all green or orange mush?--and called Mikey on one of the store intercoms, which Michael had long since regretted ever showing him how to use.

"Mike Novotny?" Michael said. His voice sounded tired.

"Hey," Brian said. "Let's ditch this place--I need to get out."

"Brian," Michael sighed exasperatedly. "I can't, I have to work."

"Fuck work," Brian said. "I haven't seen you in forever." Playing the you're-being-a-bad-friend-and-I-need-you card almost always worked on Michael.

"I know," Michael acknowledged, "but we have inventory tonight, and the big boss is coming for inspections tomorrow, and I really have to be here--they've got me scheduled until one, but if I'm outta here by four in the morning I'll count myself lucky. That dick on the night shift never shows up, anyway, and--"

"Mikey," Brian interrupted, and if Michael had been able to see Brian's face at that moment he probably would have left work to go with him, but all he heard was the silence over the phone. "Please?" Brian said finally.

Michael sighed. "I'm really sorry, Brian, but I just can't." And the phone went click.

Brian went out without Michael, had a few drinks and considering letting a guy blow him, but he got sick of it all so fast that he ended up going home, stopping at the liquor store first.

When he got back to the loft, Justin was sitting on his doorstep. Well, not quite on his doorstep--the kid was inside the building, sitting impatiently on the stairs next to the elevator. "They're fighting," Justin said. "I don't want to go home. Can I stay here for the night?"

Brian got in the elevator and Justin followed behind him. When he slid open the door to the loft and went in there, Justin followed behind him again. Finally, Brian responded to his question. "Fine. But if I hear a single word about alcoholism out of you, you're out on your ass." He held up a bottle. "You want some?"

* * *

Brian had figured out a while ago that the kid was fucking funny when he was drunk. It didn't take much, either, probably since he was young and small and had no tolerance built up. But he started to tell the most elaborate stories, like the one about the time he rode an elephant at the zoo and almost got trampled by a zebra, and he used these sweeping hand gestures and facial expressions and yeah, it was just fun. Great entertainment, and way better than cable.

But tonight, Brian wasn't really in the mood for that, so every time the kid started to try to tell some bullshit story, Brian poured him another drink.

Brian wasn't sure when exactly it happened, but he kind of gave up worrying about it because shit, these things just kept fucking happening around the kid. At some point, though, one or the other of them leaned over on the couch, and they started kissing.

It really wasn't very good kissing, because they were both really drunk, and Justin kept trying to talk, and he wasn't really a very good kisser to begin with--it must be an acquired talent, Brian decided, though he'd certainly met worse kissers before.

Then Brian managed to stick his hand up under Justin's shirt, and stroked his stomach, which was soft, and smooth, and not bruised at the moment. And he liked the way it felt, under his hand, so he pulled away from the kid's mouth and pushed his shirt up so he could admire his stomach. Justin tried to help him out by pulling his shirt off, but it got stuck on his head, pulling all his hair back and caught there like some sort of bizarre orange turban.

This reminded Brian of the elephant riding story, and he was distracted from Justin's stomach, and sat up, and kind of flopped backwards towards the armrest.

Justin sat up, too, and leaned over him, trying to kiss him again and open Brian's pants at the same time, except he really wasn't fucking coordinated enough to do that. One of the liquor bottles had gotten lodged somewhere in the couch and now it was behind Brian's back, and it was poking him really uncomfortably, and probably any second it would break and he'd die of blood loss.

He had a momentary vision of the red blood on his white sofa, and his father standing over the whole thing saying how fucking fairies always got what they deserved.

So he squirmed on the couch, trying to reach for the liquor bottle to get it out of the way, and he shoved kind of irritably at Justin to get him to move so Brian could get the bottle, and Justin bit his lip and looked kind of worried.

Eventually Justin got his pants open and, still biting his lip and looking nervous, started to take Brian's dick into his hand.

Brian stared at the ceiling and wondered if there were any gay elephants.

* * *

When Brian awoke, it was to the sound of his cell phone and his cordless phone ringing at the same time.

He couldn't see a clock from where he was lying on the couch, but the amount of light shining through the windows was not a good sign. "Fuck," he said, because he was late for work. He wished his head would stop throbbing somewhat.

Then he realized that he was half naked, and Justin was stretched out on top of him on the couch. Worst of all, Justin was also half naked, and appeared to be wearing a turban.

"Fuck," Brian said again, rubbing his temples.

His cell phone turned out to be Ryder, who wanted to know where the fuck he was, and Brian told him it'd been a family emergency because his father was sick. That was all true. The cordless was Jennifer, who was all in a panic because Justin was missing--apparently she'd thought he was over at Daphne's, but then the school called to report that he was absent, and Mrs. Chanders denied that Justin had ever been there.

From the pained way the kid moaned and clutched his head when Brian shook him awake, it seemed unlikely that Justin was going to be able to go to school that day. So Brian forced the kid to drink some water, pondered giving him some Tylenol but remembered that he was allergic. He told Jennifer that Justin wasn't feeling well and suggested that she come pick him up after work--in a note to Justin he suggested that Justin eat something when he woke up. Then he pulled the kid's clothes back on him and put all the alcohol away to hide all the evidence for when Jennifer came over.

Finally, Brian was out the door and on his way to work.

* * *

When Brian went over for dinner later that week it was a long and awkward meal. They couldn’t eat meat because it was against Jack’s new dietary restrictions, so they were having some form of bean fake meat shit that was pretty much the most disgusting thing Brian had ever tasted. And while usually even the most boring meals at the Kinney household were garnished with a lot of stupid chatter from Justin, now the kid was sullen and quiet, shoving food around on his plate and trying to hide the bean shit under his potatoes. Which was a good idea, actually, and Brian copied it.

Jennifer started the conversation with a few weak openers, like, “So, how was your day?” But none of them carried very far, and it seemed as though maybe Jack had finally beaten the spirit out of the family.

Brian made some of his own attempts at conversation, asking Justin about a comic book he’d given him a few weeks ago, and about school and the Sophocles play they were reading, and when nothing got more than one word answers out of the kid, he even tried to cheer him up by kicking his leg gently under the table, but after that Justin just stood up and asked if he could be excused.

His mother nodded awkwardly, Justin cleared away his plate, and Brian was left to suffer through dinner with Jennifer and Jack.

He meant to go again the next week and talk to the kid, but Ryder pulled a last minute business trip on him and he ended up in Florida making a bunch of lame-ass PowerPoint presentations prepared by Bob and Brad.

The next week, Deb and Vic moved back to Pittsburgh.

Emmett put up a banner that was so brightly colored Brian was convinced it would give Vic a headache just to look at it, and Michael was completely obsessed with helping with every step of the process. Brian helped too, and he and Michael made a road trip to New York with the Jeep to collect a bunch of stuff that they didn’t want to put into storage with one of Vic’s old friends. He helped unpack the stuff back at the house and settle everyone in, and Michael was over there almost constantly, trying to help his mother and generally getting in the way.

It was a while before he even told Michael about his dad. When he did, it turned out that Deb and Vic were there too, the four of them enjoying the lawn chairs in the back yard on one of the first warmish spring days.

They gave him the usual expressions of sympathy that he shrugged off, but then Deb told him that he should come out to his dad before he died.

Brian scoffed at this suggestion, and Michael tried to defend Brian, but that almost even made it worse, that Michael should be trying to defend him.

“It’s not his fucking business,” Brian insisted.

“Brian,” Vic said softly. “I think I can say with some authority that if you don’t tell him now, you’ll regret it later. Don’t do it for him. Do it for you, so you won’t have to live with that, after.”

No one would get off his case about it, and pretty soon Lindsay found out, too, and she was saying the same thing.

And he told them all to fuck off and mind their own business, and he threw himself into the new campaign they had expanding the candy market of one of their clients to include teenagers as well as little kids. Brian wished that he could have shown one of the ads to Justin, to see what he thought about its effectiveness, but the next time he went over to the house he didn’t head inside, he went into the garage.

His father took his pronouncement about how Brian thought he would.

Mikey wasn’t working that evening so Brian awoke at three in the morning to the ringing of his cell phone, and he had to get up out of Michael’s bed and fish it out of his jacket, which had been thrown on the couch.

He didn’t recognize the number, and he didn’t recognize the voice on the other end, either.

It was the kid's little girlfriend on the phone. Daphne. She was hysterical, and Brian could hardly make out what she was saying, but he got the point pretty fast.

"Yeah, I'm on my way."

He pulled on his jacket, kissed Michael's cheek and told him he was leaving--Michael responded with a groan--and headed out the door.

He remembered where Daphne's house was, which was fortunate since she hadn't been in any condition to give him directions over the phone. He pulled up by the curb in front of the suburban mansion, and when he approached the front door it opened right in front of him, and the girl poked her head around.

"Shh," she said. "Don't wake up my parents."

Christ, Brian thought. But he nodded in response, and she led him, tiptoeing down to the house basement, where Justin was lying on the couch. His face was streaked with tears and he was moaning.

Brian crouched down next to the couch. "Justin," he said softly, and the kid's eyes snapped open.

The kid sniffled and started to cry afresh. "Brian," he said, whimpering. "Brian, he broke my arm, it's broken, it's broken and I'll never be able to draw again..." The kid kept crying and Brian noticed that Justin was indeed holding his right arm awkwardly with his other hand, and it was bent in a way that was painful to look at.

"Don't worry about it," Brian told him, smoothing the hair off his forehead. "We're gonna go to the doctor and they'll give you a cast and some nice drugs and it'll be just fine in a few weeks."

Justin was not consoled, and continued to insist that he was ruined forever.

"Can you walk?" Brian asked him. "We have to get you to the doctor."

Justin blinked a few times and seemed to refocus on Brian again.

"Brian," he said desperately, "Brian, I didn't even do anything, I swear, I didn't do anything, I was asleep in bed and he just came up to my room and--"

Brian closed his eyes for a moment. "I know," he said reassuringly. "C'mon, try to sit up."

* * *

Later, Brian could only remember snatches of that night. This happened to him frequently--he would know that he spent the previous evening at Babylon but would awake only remembering the insight he'd had getting a blow job in the alley, when a pattern in the bricks on the building across from him had suddenly looked like an angel.

These snatches were different.

He remembered how timid Justin's voice was in the car, as he sat in the backseat, still clutching his arm, when he asked Brian, "What do I tell them when we get there?"

He looked back at Justin in the rearview mirror, and he said, "Tell them the truth."

He remembered the nurse handing him forms to fill out for his "brother," and mechanically writing up the list of all of Justin's allergies. He remembered that the police arrived before Jennifer did, and he remembered how Justin clung to his hand as they took pictures of all of his injuries, and he remembered the look of fury on the cop's face as he told Jennifer that Jack Kinney was going to be arrested and facing serious criminal charges.

There were other things, too--he remembered telling the social services woman who kept trying to talk to Jennifer about leaving Jack that Justin was coming home with him, and he remembered how when they asked Justin whether he'd rather go live with his brother or have his real father contacted to make arrangements for him, Justin quietly said, "I'm going with him."

And he remembered other things, too, he remembered sitting in the same waiting room with Debbie, and he remembered insisting to a nurse that his bruises were all from the soccer field. He remembered the look on his father's face--was it only ten hours ago, now?--when he told him he was gay.

But he only wanted to forget.

* * *

Justin’s arm was a clean break and didn’t require surgery or anything, so they let Brian take him home that morning after they’d put a cast on it.

The next day, after bailing Jack out of jail, Jennifer brought over a bag of Justin’s stuff. They bought Justin a futon that they set up in a corner of the loft and a bookshelf and desk to go next to it. Justin sat on the couch and sort of watched everything apathetically, but he seemed relieved when his mother finally left.

The kid’s disappointment was refreshed when he realized that not only could he not draw with a cast on, but he wouldn’t be able to take driver’s ed one-handed, either, and he’d been planning to learn to drive that summer. His spirits were low, and sometimes Brian felt like they were all just waiting for the fucking cast to come off so everything could be normal again, except fuck, what did either of them know about normal anyway?

Brian spent half his evenings visiting Vic, Michael and Debbie at the hospital, and the other half taking dictation of the kid’s homework, until one day he came home from work and caught the kid writing fluently with his left hand. He pressured Justin into an admission that he was actually ambidextrous, and then, for the first time, he actually understood the desire to beat the shit out of the kid.

Summer came. Jack and some lawyer Jennifer procured managed to plead his charge down to a misdemeanor, gathering a lot of sympathy with the cancer issue and claiming mitigating circumstances with a medication he’d been on that might potentially have caused violent mood swings as a side effect.

But the sex was good.

It was hesitant, at first--Brian just wanted to touch the kid, to sling an arm around his shoulders and squeeze his waist and bury his face in his neck and try to tell the kid that everything was going to be okay. But Justin seemed to think that it had to be about sex, and what did Brian know, anyway--maybe it did.

So at first it was hesitant, and reverent--Brian sucking Justin off slowly while Justin whimpered and tried to restrain himself from waving his arm and bashing Brian in the head with his cast. It was gentle fucking, and oh so quiet, both of them suppressing moans as if the neighbors would hear them and come and try to stop it--though Brian had determined a long time ago that his neighbors were all completely deaf.

The quiet didn’t last forever. The kid got his cast off, and seemed to get over a few inhibitions, and he developed a habit of repeating Brian’s name during sex--pleading, frustrated, begging, praising, worshipping--he had tone of voice for each emotion, and he expressed them all with Brian’s name. This kind of messed with Brian’s desire to pretend the kid was someone else, his growing desire to pretend that maybe this wasn’t him, this was all someone else because he wasn’t doing this.

But there were ways to shut the kid up, and Brian found them. Kissing worked pretty well, and the kid got way better at it with practice, too. Sticking his dick in the kid’s mouth worked even better, and the kid loved it. There was like a month of what seemed like constant blowjobs, as Justin struggled to improve his technique and completely suppress his gag reflex, and God, it was fantastic.

Brian found himself growing vaguely itchy--resentment festering under his skin about something nameless that he couldn’t identify. And he took it out on the kid, beginning to quiet him with a hand over his mouth instead of a kiss when he didn’t want to hear his name, pulling out the gags and the dildos and the kink as though it were some sort of test for the kid--you want to be here, in my bed? Well then this is what you have to do. But the kid met every challenge, and got off on all of it--as the sex got rougher and more competitive, the kid only seemed to like it more, meeting Brian bite for bite, scratch for scratch, learning to talk dirty. He could go from coquettish to sexual predator in the blink of an eye, and he did, flashing from angel to tiger and back.

Brian left for work early in the morning because as soon as he woke to find the kid’s arm around his chest and come on his leg he couldn’t get back to sleep, and while he’d jacked off in the shower in the morning for most of his life, he found himself strangely not in the mood anymore. He put in extra hours at the gym as though he could work this off in reps like an extra plate of Deb’s ravioli. He came home late, too, as taking clients out suddenly became drastically more fascinating than microwave dinners and geometry homework.

But no matter how hard he tried to stay away, Justin was always there when he got back.

* * *

It turned out that Michael was the one who found out first.

Michael walked into the loft just as Brian was enjoying a post-coital cigarette. This had happened before, but Michael seemed to think it was different this time.

Brian suggested that Justin go take a shower, and Michael freaked out, pacing around and waving his arms.

“Oh. My. God. You could get in so much trouble for this. This is so fucking illegal I can’t even imagine how illegal it is.”

Brian pulled a beer out of the fridge. “Who’s gonna get me in trouble, Mikey?” Brian asked, with a challengingly raised eyebrow.

“I don’t know!” Michael shouted exasperatedly. “But someone’ll find out. One of the kid’s teachers or something!”

Brian rolled his eyes. “Unlike you, Mikey, the kid’s teachers are not in the habit of walking in to my apartment at any moment.”

“What if he tells somebody?”

“He’s smart; he knows when to keep his mouth shut.”

“Does he?”

Brian frowned and took another swig of beer.

Michael looked like he might be ready to tear his hair out. “He’s your brother,” Michael hissed. “This is illegal! It’s fucking child abuse! This is what your father went to jail for, Brian.”

“For one night,” Brian scoffed.

“Yeah, but you won’t have cancer to get you out early, either,” Michael said.

Just about then, Justin poked his head out of the bathroom. “Are you done yelling yet? Can I come out now?”

“Yeah, sure,” Brian told him.

Michael stood in the middle of the loft, shaking his head. Justin came out of the bathroom and pulled some clothes out of Brian’s dresser and started to get dressed.

Once he had his clothes on, Michael led him over to the couch and sat Justin down for a little talk.

“Look, Justin,” Michael began, “you don’t have to live here if you don’t want to. There are other options, and lots of people who can help you.”

Brian snorted in the background.

“I’ll help you,” Michael continued. “Maybe you could move in with my mom--she’d be really nice to you, and--“

Justin looked confused. “Why would I want to do that?” he asked.

“You don’t want to bother Deb with this,” Brian said warningly. “She’s got more important things on her mind.”

Michael ignored him. “You are important,” he told Justin, which made Justin start to smirk a little bit, “and I don’t want you to think that living here with Brian is your only option.”

Justin laughed a little bit. “I like living with Brian,” he said. “It’s not like he makes me perform sexual favors as my half of the rent or anything. I just want to get laid like everybody else,” he shrugged helplessly, grinning.

“Yeah,” Brian chimed in. “Is that such a crime, Mikey?” he asked smarmily.

Michael groaned and flopped back on the couch. “Yes!” He said. “It is a crime.” He turned towards Justin. “You’re not fucking allowed to get laid until you’re older.”

Justin laughed. “Says who?”

“The law!” Michael said.

Brian sat down on the couch next to Michael, and slung an arm around Mikey’s shoulders. “He’s just jealous because he hasn’t seen any action in four weeks,” he confided to Justin. Justin made sympathetic noises. Brian squeezed Michael’s shoulder. “So how ‘bout we go out, and get you a nice blow job. And then I’m sure you’ll feel much better about everything,” Brian concluded with a fake smile.

“That will not fucking make me feel better,” Michael muttered.

* * *

In the fall, Brian was called in for a parent-teacher conference with Justin’s high school guidance counselor. He left the office for the evening and drove straight to Justin’s school for the meeting. The counselor was a short woman with dark brown hair and glasses.

“Mr. Taylor,” she greeted him, “thanks for coming in on a such short notice.”

“It’s Kinney,” he corrected, rubbing the back of his neck. “Is there a problem with Justin at school?”

“Oh,” the woman said, frowning. “You’re not Justin’s father?”

“I’m his brother,” Brian said tersely. “He lives with me.”

She nodded, jotting down a note about this. “I knew there was some confusion over Justin’s guardianship last year, but I wasn’t sure how it had worked out. I must say, though, that it seems to have worked out well--Justin’s doing much better in school this year than last year, when his grades were below what we would expect from someone with his test scores.”

She seemed to be waiting for some sort of response from Brian, but he didn’t provide one.

She continued, eventually. “Anyway, I just wanted to say that this year he seems much more settled, and happier, so it’s good that his problems at home were resolved before he started to suffer more academically from the disruption.” She handed Brian a transcript of Justin’s grades. “Right now he’s doing quite well,” she said, “and all of his teachers speak very highly of him--you should be quite proud,” she added with a smile.

Brian just grunted.

“Anyway, Justin’s expressed an interest in graduating early from high school--I assume he’s spoken to you about this?”

“He’s mentioned it,” Brian said.

“Usually we try to discourage children from trying to grow up too fast,” the counselor said. “But in Justin’s case, because he’s exceptionally bright and extremely motivated, it does seem like allowing him to progress through high school at an accelerated rate might be the best path. He could begin attending college early, then--though you might want to consider having him continue living at home for his first year or so, since it might be a hard social adjustment into college even if it isn’t a problem academically.”

Brian nodded.

“So if Justin decides to graduate early, then he’d have an increased workload second term and next year, but then he’d be able to graduate right then, at the end of his junior year.” The woman talked a little longer about the classes Justin might take, and encouraged Brian to not let Justin’s extra studies interfere with his social life--what social life? Brian thought, all the kid ever did was study and hang out with him, with the occasional venture over to his little girlfriend’s house--and told him again that he must be proud of having such an intelligent younger brother.

“Well, if you have any questions, I’d be happy to try to answer them,” the counselor concluded finally, and Brian kind of sensed that the question she was hoping for was an invitation out to dinner and a movie, but he just shook his head. “I’m sure it’ll be an important decision that you and Justin will discuss,” she said, shaking his hand as they both moved towards the door.

“Right,” Brian said, clearing his throat. “Thanks.”

* * *

Melanie and Lindsay were by the loft once, on another of their attempts at sperm-gathering, and Brian overheard their conversation from the bathroom.

“Oh my God,” Mel said, astounded. “He’s fucking that kid.”

Brian could hear Lindsay whap her lover. “Mel!” She was scandalized.

“He totally is.”

“Don’t try to turn him taking in his abused step-brother into some sort of perverted child-molesting just because you don’t like him. I think it’s just another piece of evidence that he’d be a wonderful father.”

“No way. I can’t believe we’re doing this.” He could hear Melanie pacing around. “He’s fucking a child.”

“Brian wouldn’t do that.”

“There’s only. one. bed.”

“That’s not true! See, Justin has a futon over in the corner.”

“If there was any more junk piled on that piece of furniture, it’d be worse than your parent’s attic.”

“Probably he cleans it off to sleep on,” Lindsay said confidently.

Brian chose that moment to make his entrance, and as he stepped out of the bathroom, Lindsay greeted him with a bright smile, while Melanie still looked shell-shocked.

* * *

Sometimes Brian thought that Jennifer had to know. She was over there all the time, dropping off vegetables that rotted in the fridge and giving Justin more clothing purchased from Old Navy. Brian suspected that she knew, deep down, but was in denial about that, just like she still believed Justin was traumatized by her divorce with Craig and not just using that to milk out more Christmas presents.

Lindsay didn’t know, and didn’t believe, either, though sometimes she sort of glanced around the loft as though looking for something, some kind of proof to support her in her firm belief that there were things that Brian Kinney would never do.

Melanie knew, and she called Justin’s school and tried to get a case going. Justin was hauled in for questioning.

“I mean,” Justin recounted later, “do they think I’m stupid or something, that if they offer me a Kleenex and ask a couple of questions suddenly I’ll start sobbing and admit that my brother touches me in ‘that naughty way’?” Justin rolled his eyes exasperatedly. “Idiots.”

“But they’re right,” Brian had to point out.

Justin shrugged. “What’s right?” He asked. “They don’t know what right is. And I’m not fucking going to let them control my life.”

“So you lied,” Brian surmised.

“Well, duh,” Justin said.

Brian just nodded.

In January, Justin got in another locker room fight. He ended up with a few good bruises, and a suspension, since he’d pushed the other kid over a bench.

Brian decided that action was needed, and dragged the kid, black eyes and all, to a martial arts studio, one that offered non-violent self-defense classes. He wrote a huge check to the black belt in charge of the school, and informed the kid that he was going to show up three afternoons a week, or no driving practice.

Justin complained about that for weeks. First he looked doofy in his uniform--he did, it was way too big for him, until they washed it and it shrunk. Then the little kids there annoyed him. Then there were weird old guys there who smelled. Then there were girls who tried to flirt with him. The list of complaints was never-ending, until he finally tested for his yellow belt, and decided he kind of liked the way it looked. After that he became obsessed with the idea of becoming a brown belt so that he could learn how to break a board with his head. Brian personally thought that the kid was already missing enough brain cells, but hey, this seemed to keep him from fighting at school, and since he was doing all his accelerated classes now, he couldn’t afford to miss due to suspensions.

Jack’s cancer had been starting to go into remission, but then it began to get progressively worse again over the summer. Tensions rose over the summer in general. While Jack was doing better for a while, Jennifer took Justin on a college visits trip, and Justin returned with his head full of ridiculous notions. Not about colleges--Brian was pretty sure he could get in pretty much anywhere he wanted, even though he was graduating early, and Lindsay was helping him with his art portfolio. No, Justin had a bug up his ass about going on vacation.

He first suggested it kind of tentatively while they were eating takeout, with the sort of diffident air he adopted when talking about things that really mattered to him. “I was thinking, Brian,” he said.

Brian got a sinking feeling, just at that.

“That maybe we could go on vacation somewhere this summer,” Justin continued quickly. “Just the two of us, I mean.”

Brian wondered who else they might have invited along.

“I’d really like to go away,” Justin continued dreamily.

“What’s wrong with the Pitts?” Brian asked sarcastically, tossing noodles around his plate with a fork.

Brian probably would have given in eventually if the kid had stopped there, but Justin talked too much for his own good and continued.

“I just,” Justin said, setting down a white carton to gesture expansively. “I wish sometimes that we could hold hands as we walked down the street, you know?”

Brian did not know. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

That discussion was only the beginning of what Brian called the “romance equals bullshit” argument that seemed to last the entire summer. It recurred at least once a week and involved prolonged periods of Justin pouting. Occasionally Brian even lost his temper and started yelling himself.

“You are not my fucking boyfriend! I do not have a fucking boyfriend! You are my brother, do you hear me? Stop fucking thinking you’re my boyfriend!”

“I’m the brother that you fuck every night,” Justin said sassily, getting up from the couch.

“Shut up,” Brian said threateningly, walking down the steps from the bedroom. “Shut up, right now.”

“But Brian,” Justin whined, clutching a throw pillow, “that’s why we need to go away, so we wouldn’t have to be brothers, just for a little while!”

The arguments usually ended with Brian storming out.

* * *

Once Justin started school again, the kid was too busy with homework and college applications to bother Brian about going on vacation, which was a blessing, but perhaps still too little, too late.

In October, Lindsay and Melanie broke up. Brian knew this because Lindsay told him.

She showed up at the loft door one Saturday afternoon when the kid was out with his mother. Brian opened the door and Lindsay came in, walking in a few steps but stopping to stand in the middle of the floor.

"Mel and I broke up," Lindsay announced, kind of casually, but Brian could see the way that she was blinking to try to hold back tears and the vaguely uncomfortable way she kept her chin tilted up toward the ceiling. He frowned, furrowing his eyebrows, and held out the joint he was smoking to Lindsay.

She waved it away with her hand, surreptitiously wiped her eyes, and continued, with a somewhat shaky voice. "I just need you to tell me one thing, Brian--just one thing. Honestly," she shook her head in that haughty way she always did when she was trying not to cry and held up a hand as if to forestall the objections that he wasn't making. She let out a sigh, then said, "Are you fucking Justin?"

Brian froze for a moment, and then he put out the joint in a tray on the kitchen counter, and with his back still turned, he said, "Yes."

Lindsay nodded, as though that was kind of what she had expected, but there were tears on her cheeks now. "I think I should go now," she said, turning back towards the door.

"Lindz," Brian called, reaching out towards her.

Lindsay didn't turn around, but she paused with her hand on the doorframe. "Don't call me," she said, and then she left down the stairs.

* * *

So Lindsay knew. Claire didn’t know, but she probably assumed because she believed all fags were child molesters anyway. Jennifer was still in denial, though. She thought Justin had a boyfriend at school. Brian knew this because she told him so.

“I think Justin has a boyfriend,” she told Brian, setting a brown paper bag on the counter.

For a second, something inside Brian twisted sharply, but he managed to say calmly, “Why do you say that?”

“Just, you know,” she shrugged, putting groceries away in the fridge. “A mother can tell when her boy’s in love,” she confided.

Brian nodded. “Uh huh,” he said dryly.

“Plus,” Jennifer continued, “last week, he had a hickey on his neck.”

Brian winced internally.

“It’s so sweet,” Jennifer said with an excited sigh. “Tell me if you get to meet the boy or anything, okay?”

“I’ll let you know,” Brian promised, rolling his eyes when Jennifer had her head turned.

But that got Brian started thinking.

“Why don’t you have any friends at school besides Daphne?” he asked Justin this one evening after sex.

“Um, because they all hate me?” Justin rolled his head on the pillow and the expression on his face said this was the most obvious thing he’d ever had to tell someone.

“They can’t all hate you,” Brian said, reaching for cigarettes. “Even you’re not that annoying.”

Justin whapped his shoulder. “They’re all homophobic pricks,” Justin said.

“What about the other gay kids?” Brian asked.

Justin snorted. “There aren’t any other gay kids,” he said.

Brian gave a choking laugh. “Yeah, please don’t try to tell me your gaydar’s that bad.”

Justin just looked confused. His nose scrunched up and his face was framed by his mop of hair and the blue cotton of the pillow.

“Oh, god, it is,” Brian concluded.

So that didn’t work out so well. But Brian still kind of liked the idea of Justin finding a boyfriend his own age. Why shouldn’t the kid have a little boyfriend, after all? He was cute, and he gave good head--all very attractive qualities in a gay male. Not that Brian knew what kind of qualities a good boyfriend should have, or that he would care even if he did know, but still.

The key was just to set the kid up with a nice little classmate or something. So he didn’t think there were any other gay guys at his school, fine--but maybe Lindsay could take him to the GLC or something and introduce him to other sixteen-year-olds. The GLC probably had a whole support group for sixteen-year-olds who had been abused by their step-relations and were now searching for boyfriends.

But Brian wasn’t really in a position to call Lindsay up and ask her to take the kid on over there.

Well, fine, he didn’t need her, anyway. Brian decided to try a different tactic. He decided to stop having sex with the kid.

It wasn’t just the own-age boyfriend idea that made him decide. It was other things, too. It was how Michael and Lindsay never spoke to him anymore. It was that itchy feeling he’d had all along. It was how he’d been so sure when he’d first fucked the kid that after he did it once, he’d lose interest and could get it out of his head--that was what happened with everyone else, after all--but that never happened. It was how he only went out once a week now, and it wasn’t fun anymore. It was how only the kid could figure out how to make their coffee maker work anymore. It was a lot of things that made Brian Kinney decide that he was going to stop fucking his step-brother.

At first, he thought he could maybe just kind of gradually stop having sex with the kid, wean him off like a baby off of milk, and eventually the kid would find a real little boyfriend at school and forget about everything.

This did not go as planned.

The main problem was that the kid would just not take a hint, no matter how many times Brian brushed him off and said he wasn’t in the mood.

Plus, when Brian said he wasn’t in the mood, the kid just laughed, and tackled him onto the bed anyway.

Finally, Brian realized that he was going to have to tell the kid. He broke the news on a Friday night.

“You what?” Justin squawked.

“I don’t want to have sex with you anymore,” Brian repeated, unloading the dishwasher.

Justin’s brow furrowed, and he even looked away from the Cartoon Network to gape at Brian. “But, why?”

Because you watch Sponge Bob every afternoon, Brian thought, but instead he said, “Because I decided.”

“I don’t understand,” Justin said, still shocked. “Are you mad at me or something? Did you meet someone else?”

“Fuck,” Brian said, slamming a bunch of forks into the drawer. “No, of course I didn’t meet someone else. When the fuck would I meet someone else? I don’t even have time to think anymore!”

Justin pouted. “I don’t know. Maybe at work or something, or doing whatever it is you’re always doing when you’re not here.”

“Yeah, there are a lot of hot guys over at Debbie’s house--we’re setting up a ménage a trois but I have to break it off with you, first.”

“Really?” Justin said, eyebrows raised.

Brian rolled his eyes. “I just decided, okay? It has nothing to do with anything.”

“Did someone find out?” Justin asked this hesitatingly. “Shit,” he started to panic, getting up off the couch.

Brian cut him off. “No, no one found out. Stop being so anal.”

“I thought you liked me being anal,” Justin threw over his shoulder, sinking back down onto the cushions.

That was so bad Brain didn’t even deign to respond.

“But I guess not,” Justin continued to himself, softly, after a moment. Brian continued to ignore him, and decided that it had gone rather well.

But of course it wasn’t over.

Justin brought it up again that evening over dinner.

“Pass me a fortune cookie,” he said, and Brian threw him one from the bag. He cracked it open and read his fortune, and whatever it said seemed to inspire him to start talking again.

“So, if you’re not going to have sex with me anymore,” Justin started, “then I’m going to have sex with other guys,” he announced, obviously waiting for Brian’s reaction.

Brian didn’t bat an eyelash. “Fine,” he said evenly. Maybe the kid would go get a nice little boyfriend at school, now.

Justin swallowed, and then continued. “So I’m going out tonight,” he said.

Brian raised an eyebrow. “Out?”

“Out,” Justin repeated firmly. “To like…bars, and clubs and stuff.”

Brian wondered if the kid could possibly be serious.

“Oh?” Brian said.

“Yeah,” Justin raised his chin defiantly. “To meet other guys.”

Brian decided to call the kid’s bluff. “Fine,” he said again. There was no way the kid would actually go through with it, and Brian wasn’t going to fall for this trick.

* * *

Brian snickered as the kid dressed himself up and primped in front of the mirror, and then finally, with a lot of last, lingering glances at Brian--who was studiously staring at his computer and not paying any attention at all--left out the door.

Brian continued snickering after the kid left, picturing him getting carded and kept out of clubs and walking dejectedly along Liberty Avenue.

Around eight, Brian remembered that there was a bouncer at BoyToy who had a real taste for young meat. Hell, BoyToy was always filled with young twinks. Brian gnawed on his lip and considered this for a moment.

Other thoughts tried to push into his head, hazy memories of guys who preferred the back alleys where the underage chicken lurked, the sharp visceral feel of the brick against his cheek, the guys who refused to wear condoms but swore they were clean.

He shoved this all aside and reminded himself about the asshole new police chief who seemed to have a personal vendetta against fucking in alleys.

Eventually he got dressed to go out himself. He still wasn’t worried, of course. But it was Friday night, after all, and what the hell was he doing sitting at home? If he headed over to BoyToy instead of Babylon, it was only because he needed some variety in his life. And if he looked twice when he thought he saw a blond head under a street lamp, it didn’t mean anything.

* * *

Brian grabbed the back of the collar of Justin’s shirt, and yanked him away from the guy he was dancing with, ignoring both of their protests. “If you ever,” he glared at the trick Justin had been dancing with, “ever touch my brother again, I’ll kill you.”

The trick backed away slowly, holding his empty hands up in front of him, babbling about how he hadn’t known.

The news would be all over Liberty within two hours.

* * *

Justin was smug about the whole thing, once he was again lying on his back in Brian’s bed, and that just pissed Brian off even more--Brian could have maybe handled the whole fucking the kid again thing if Justin hadn’t had to be so smug about it all. He wanted to wipe that smile right off the kid’s face.

He thrust in, hard. Justin moaned a little bit, so Brian did it again, grunting. “Does it hurt?” he asked Justin fiercely.

“Yes, yes,” Justin whimpered, clutching the sheets in his fists and closing his eyes tightly.

Brian thrust again. “What about that?”

Justin hissed. “Yes,” he said. “It’s good, more, Brian.”

And Justin liked it just that little bit rough, but at the moment, Brian didn’t really want Justin to like it. He wanted the kid to hate it, so that he’d swear off sex and clubs and fucking forever and just go back to being a cute little twelve-year-old again, back to being the kind of kid he’d been before Brian came along.

He noticed, as he was fucking the kid, that his hands seemed to be traveling towards Justin’s throat. He rested one on Justin’s shoulder and tangled the other in his hair to distract himself, he put his weight on them and made sweaty handprints on the sheets--but he couldn’t help but see it in his head, see his hands oh so clearly as they closed around Justin’s throat, as they tightened on his windpipe.

He could see the picture so clearly in his mind--it was as though the picture was superimposed on the image of Justin’s trusting eyes staring up at him through some sort of movie special effect--so clear it almost made him sick, but at the same time, he was hard, and he was fucking Justin, and his fingers tightened convulsively when he came, scrabbling for something he wouldn’t let himself have.

Afterwards, Justin was still too fucking smug for his own good, and he cuddled up to Brian’s side with a contented little sigh.

Brian shoved the kid away and stalked over to the shower, ignoring Justin’s questioning eyes.

When he came out of the shower he pulled clothes out his drawers and put them on.

“What are you doing?” Justin asked from the bed.

“Going out,” Brian said tersely. “Go to sleep.”

* * *

Somehow, they made it through the rest of Justin’s senior year. Brian still isn’t quite sure how that happened. At some point, Justin started to push a little less, and things relaxed a bit. When Justin made his decision to go to the College of the Chicago Art Institute, Brian congratulated him with genuine pride. And when Jack died over the summer, Brian found himself crying late at night into Justin’s shoulder, and that wasn’t as hard as thought it would be, either.

This is not to say that things were easy. To the contrary. The hardest part was when Justin got in trouble at school for drawing pictures of naked people in class--how dumb could the kid be? Brian wondered, when he got the call at work to come in and discuss this with the principal. The look on the principal’s face when she realized that Justin’s guardian was also the man depicted in the drawings had been priceless, though Brian hadn’t found it particularly funny at the time. He’s still not sure how they got out of that one, but the kid had a gift for fast-talking.

For every good moment, every moment that the two of them seemed to be perfectly in synch, every moment that they maybe smiled at each other without anything else clouding it, every moment that Brian slapped Justin on the ass good-naturedly in the kitchen, there were ten moments when they were both pissed off, irritated, pouting, yelling, or glaring, and a hundred other moments when they were simply ignoring each other altogether.

During one of the last good moments, towards the end of the summer, they ended up lying on their backs on the bed, staring up at the ceiling and sharing a joint. Justin was talking, as usual.

“I always thought I’d be kind of sad when I went away to college, you know?” Justin said. “Just, to leave everybody I know and everything I know and go off to someplace completely new and foreign. I thought it’d be exciting, but a little sad, or something.”

Brian couldn’t really relate to this. “I couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of here.”

Justin sat up and raised an eyebrow at him. “I guess we’ve got more in common than you thought,” Justin said, getting up and heading down the steps towards the kitchen.

Brian stared at the ceiling some more, listening to the noises of Justin rustling through the refrigerator, and remembered how he had felt his last summer at home, before he moved out. Claire had gotten married that summer, so she’d been over a lot, and his father had always been bitching about the cost of the wedding, and so Claire was always crying and going on and on about how she knew that Mom would have wanted her to have a beautiful wedding, if only she’d been around to see it.

And he thought about Justin’s life, and how the kid worked at a coffee shop and brought him low-fat lattes at work after his shift, and how Justin’s mother bought him all sorts of stuff for his new dorm room, and how Justin’s new roommate’s name was Evan, or Eric, or something like that.

Brian got up off the bed and wandered into the kitchen, coming up behind Justin and wrapping his arms around his waist. “You’re going to love college,” he told Justin.

Justin squirmed around in his arms, and for the first time, the kid looked a little hesitant about it. “Do you really think so?” Justin asked. “I mean, what if my roommate’s a jerk and my professors all hate me and--”

Justin trailed off as Brian shook his head slowly.

Justin sighed. “I’ll call you,” he promised, rubbing his head against Brian’s shirt. “And write emails and stuff.”

Brian shook his head again. “Forget about me,” he said. “You’re gonna love college.”

* * *

Justin was leaving for college on August 23rd. His mother was going with him, flying to Chicago to help him unpack and set up and buy a bunch more stuff once he got there. Brian got up early that morning, before the time he got up even when he was going in to the gym, and left for work. When he got home that evening, Justin was gone.

It was kind of a relief, really. Brian had to buy a new coffeemaker, since Justin was the only one who had been able to figure out the old one, but that wasn’t so bad. He even packed up the old coffeemaker in a box and shipped it off to the kid at college, because he figured that college students need lots of caffeine.

His life was back the way he wanted it, now. He worked, and Marty had promised to make him a partner by the end of the fiscal year. He went out, and he didn’t have to call Justin to remind him to go to bed, though sometimes he found himself fishing for his cell phone in his pocket before he remembered.

He could bring tricks back to the loft now, too.

Justin sent him emails occasionally, and sometimes he read them, and sometimes he left them unopened in his inbox. Once, when he found a really hot porn site, he emailed Justin the link.

He managed to evade the usual family holiday angst by being away on business for Thanksgiving, and luckily, Jennifer and Justin went to visit her parents in Boston for Christmas.

Brian hung out with Michael occasionally, when his friend wasn’t busy with his new boyfriend, some fucking chiropractor or something. One evening he was at Babylon, trying to ignore Emmett and Ted talking about some stupid chick flick movie, when the bartender gave him a hint.

“There’s a new hottie in town--just showed up tonight.”

Brian raised a questioning eyebrow and the guy nodded, stacking up glasses behind the bar.

“He headed for the backroom a few minutes ago, with a whole crowd of guys behind him.”

Brian figured that at least someone new in town meant he wouldn’t have to risk fucking someone he’d already done, and decided to check it out.

* * *

When Brian stepped out of the shower, he heard the loft door closing. Justin walked into the loft; he was humming a little bit.

“Hey,” Justin said excitedly, bouncing onto his toes. Brian walked over towards him slowly, draping the towel around his waist.

“Hey,” Brian said, scratching the back of his neck. “I saw you at Babylon.”

“Mmm?” Justin said, stepping closer, moving into Brian’s space but not touching him yet. “I didn’t see you. I was busy,” he grinned.

“Yeah, I noticed.”

Justin leaned in and bit Brian’s collarbone. “See anybody hot tonight?” he asked.

Brian was spared from answering because Justin returned his attention to Brian’s neck. Brian hissed. “What are you doing?” he asked Justin.

Justin pulled his head back and grinned indolently, grabbing the towel from around Brian’s waist and whapping Brian’s ass with it.

Justin stripped his shirt off and threw it over towards the couch, taking a few steps back towards the door and unbuttoning his jeans. “C’mere,” he said to Brian, cocking his head to the side.

Almost unwillingly, Brian walked towards him. Justin looped the towel around Brian’s neck and drew his head down for a kiss. The kid knew how to kiss, now, lips and teeth and tongue and mingled hot breath. Brian reached his hands around to rest on Justin’s hips, but when he moved down to fondle his ass, Justin pulled away.

“Ah ah ah,” Justin said, laughing. He used the towel to tug Brian closer to the pillar, and suddenly, Brian found himself facing the pillar with Justin behind him, Justin’s tongue on the back of his neck, and the towel still around his neck with Justin holding onto both ends.

Justin tugged slightly on the towel and Brian could feel it rub hotly against his skin. “This reminds me,” Justin said, in between licks of Brian’s shoulders, “of when Master Chung gave that lecture on how to use your belt as a weapon--“

Justin moved a little closer, pressing Brian in to the column. “Belt?” Brian said, somewhat incoherently. The towel forced him to bend his head back and Justin nipped his ear.

Somewhere along the line, Justin’s pants had come off. “And there was that one brown belt,” Justin continued, and Brian mused that some things apparently never changed, because the kid still babbled about the dumbest things during sex.

But some things changed, apparently. Because Brian had never found himself gripping the sides of the pillar in his living room with white knuckles before, panting and resting his head against the metal as Justin fucked him. That had never happened before. And other things had never happened before. He’d never been tempted to watch his younger step-brother fuck other guys in the backroom at Babylon before, and he’d never realized how hard this vision would make him. And he had wrestled with Justin in bed before, jokingly trying to get the kid to just shut up and roll over, but Justin had never won before, never forced Brian to grin and give in because he couldn’t admit that Justin could maybe make him roll over even if he resisted.

These things were different.

* * *

There were other things that were different, too. Because Justin wasn’t living in the loft anymore, he was renting a room over the summer with his little girlfriend, Daphne, who felt abandoned because Justin had left her alone for her senior year.

“It’s like you’ve turned straight,” Brian said once, lighting a cigarette.

“Nah,” Justin grinned, stealing a hit, “the sex wasn’t that good.”

Brian couldn’t keep his jaw from dropping a little. “You fucked Daphne?”

Justin nodded.

“Was it good?”

Justin wrinkled his nose. “She needs a bit more practice, I think.”

Brian frowned, reclaiming his cigarette. “Why’d you do it?”

“She asked me to,” Justin said.

“And that was all it took?” Brian said, still frowning.

“Yep,” Justin agreed. “Hey,” he pointed out. “I fuck you all the time, and you don’t even ask first.”

* * *

Sometimes, Brian watched Justin dancing at Babylon. By sometimes, we really mean every second Justin was there doing it. He wondered how he had never noticed that the kid could dance before, and it was hard to make himself lean casually against the bar when he wanted to go shove whoever the kid was dancing with away and drag the kid into the backroom by the hair.

He wondered who had taught Justin that trick with his tongue, too, because last night when Justin blew him, Brian had come harder than ever before.

One time, Justin had music on while he was cooking something in the kitchen, and Brian pulled him away from the cutting board and into the open space. “Dance for me,” Brian said.

Justin grinned, wiping his hands on the apron he was wearing. “Dance with me,” he challenged, and they did dance for a little while, until their clothes started coming off and they ended up in bed.

After they danced and ended up in bed, the sex was tender. Brian rolled Justin onto his side, and tilted his head back so they could kiss as he fucked Justin slowly, so slowly, and fisted his cock.

After, Justin snuggled up into his side, running a hand through Brian’s hair and trailing fingers across his chest, and so on, and Brian sighed, and let him.

“I was thinking,” Brian said finally. “We should get the fuck out of Pittsburgh this weekend. Go someplace nice.”

“Mm,” Justin said, nuzzling Brian’s neck. “I wish I could, but I’ve got plans.”

“Plans?” Brian said, not letting anything show in his voice.

“Yeah,” Justin said sleepily.

“That’s fine, whatever, if you don’t want to go,” Brian said. “It was just an idea.”

“I’d love to go, though,” Justin said. “Another time?”

“Whatever,” Brian said, vaguely irritated that he had even brought it up in the first place.

The next day, Brian was trying to find the fucking coffee in the cupboard but the kid had hidden it again, so he went into the bedroom and shook Justin awake to make him go find the fucking coffee already.

Justin snorted, and rubbed his eyes, and went into the kitchen to take over the task of making the coffee.

Brian sat at the counter with bed hair. “What the fuck are your plans for this weekend, anyway?” he asked.

“Oh, I’m meeting Eric and Jonah in Florida,” Justin said, pouring two mugs of coffee. “We’re gonna stay at Jonah’s grandparent’s condo--I guess they’ve got a place near the beach.”

And Brian shouldn’t have said anything more, but he hadn’t had his morning coffee yet, so cut him a little slack. “And were you planning on fucking telling me about your little trip, or were you just going to run off?” he said, pissed, and frowning.

Justin took a sip of coffee and gave Brian a look that said, I know what you’re thinking and I think it’s cute that you’re disappointed we can’t go on vacation. “I don’t need you to sign my permission slips anymore,” Justin said calmly. And as he went to get dressed he pressed a kiss to Brian’s forehead.

* * *

On the anniversary of his father's death, Brian bought a bottle of whisky and took it to Jack's grave. He sat there on the grass for a couple of hours, since it was a Saturday, and eventually Justin found him and plopped down on the grass beside him.

Finally, after heavy silence and bugs droning in the background, Brian swallowed, and said gruffly, "I'm glad he's dead."

Justin squinted at Brian, because from his angle the sun was behind Brian's head and put his face into shadow. Justin nodded, not in agreement, but slower, kind of an acknowledgement that he knew that was what Brian wanted to believe, at least.

Justin looked back at the grave, and they were silent for another moment.

Brian cleared his throat. "Do you ever," he began, "do you ever feel like he's watching you?"

Justin looked up at Brian, startled. "No," Justin said after a moment. "No, Brian--not since you took me out of there." Justin gently put the emphasis on 'you' and leaned in against Brian's side, briefly.

Brian shrugged a little, and then he shifted a little closer to Justin so they were touching again.

"Sometimes," Justin said suddenly, "I felt like you were watching me, in Chicago," he offered.

Brian raised an eyebrow.

Justin grinned. "It made me feel hot," he said.

Brian couldn't help but smirk back at the kid. He reached over to wrap an arm around Justin's shoulder. "C'mon," he said. "Let's get out of here." And they did.

* * *

After the kid got back from Florida, he bugged Brian incessantly about the vacation idea again until finally Brian made reservations at a coastal resort. Well, it wasn’t so much incessant bugging as he mentioned twice that if Brian still wanted to go on vacation, he didn’t have to work the weekend of the 15th and 16th.

On Friday, they stayed in their room and fucked. On Saturday, they stayed in their room and fucked. On Sunday, Justin insisted that he wanted to go swimming, so they went out to the beach for a few hours, and then, after a little over-enthusiastic application of sunscreen and a lot of rubbing, they went back to their room and fucked. Sunday night, Brian insisted that they go out to a club, and he let Justin dance for a bit before parading out onto the floor and pulling Justin into his arms. They picked out a hot guy at the club, and took him back to their hotel with them, and then Brian watched Justin fuck the guy; it was hot.

Things were good over the summer, even after they got back from their vacation. Justin was over a lot, but not too much--he seemed to have a sense for when Brian was sick of him and wanted him to leave, but that was starting to be less and less often.

Brian tried to remind himself of all the reasons Justin was annoying, all the reasons that he was glad the kid was going to be leaving again soon for Chicago. There was the way he bought high-fat ice cream, and how he left the TV on while he was doing other things, and the way he tracked dirt in the house and let the faucet drip after brushing his teeth. There was the kid’s mother, who called periodically to ask if Justin had a boyfriend and always wanted to take him and Justin out for brunch.

But then, there was Justin jacking him off slowly in the middle of the night, and there was Justin pressed against the glass in the shower. There was Justin sprawled on the couch watching tv. There was Justin checking his email on Brian’s laptop and bookmarking lame porn sites. There was Justin picking up the dry cleaning and Justin losing at poker but winning at chess and Justin in the bed, against the counter, on the couch, and lying on the rug.

Then again, there had been the kid’s mother calling and saying that she was really sure this wasn’t necessary, but just maybe, Brian should talk to Justin about safe sex. “We’ve talked,” Brian had told her shortly, but really, Justin still owed him like a hundred blowjobs for that, even though it’d been years ago. The kid didn’t appreciate the kind of sacrifices that Brian had made for him.

But they weren’t quite sacrifices, really. They were more like…habits, almost. The two of them stopped at Taco Bell--or, as Brian liked to think of it, Toxic Hell--on their way back from the coast. They got in a lame argument over who was going to pay when the clerk asked if their orders were together. “Yes,” Brian said, because hell, he’d supported the kid for years.

Justin laughed. “No, I can get it,” he said.

“Justin,” Brian said warningly. The clerk began to look nervous and scurried into the back to go find some horsemeat or something to dump in the tacos.

Justin raised his eyebrows. “I can pay for my own tacos, Brian,” he said.

“That’s not the point,” Brian argued.

“What is the point?” Justin asked.

Brian stuck his tongue in his cheek. “The point is that I’m going to pay and you’re going to go get us some little ketchup packets. It’s called division of labor.”

Justin gave him a look, for a second, that knowing look that he seemed to be giving Brian more and more often recently, and Brian met his gaze challengingly.

Finally Justin raised his arms in surrender. “Fine,” he said. “If it makes you feel all special to buy the tacos, knock yourself out.”

“Don’t forget the straws,” Brian called out behind him.

* * *

Justin had to go back to college early because he was working as an assistant to one of the sculpting profs who wanted help setting up his studio before classes started. So he packed up his stuff and made plans to move in early in the dorms.

“My flight’s on Friday,” Justin announced to Brian on Wednesday evening as they sat on the couch watching TV.

Brian looked up sharply. “Friday? I didn’t think you were leaving until next week.”

“Stanzburg wants help in his studio so he pulled some strings for me to move in early.”

Brian nodded, slowly.

“And tomorrow night,” Justin continued, “my mom’s making me go out to dinner with my father and his latest bimbo girlfriend.”

“Don’t go,” Brian said.

Justin shrugged. “I guess he’s going to cough up half my tuition this year, which’ll help my mom out, and so I have to go and act appropriately grateful.”

“Is your mom having trouble?” Brian asked as Justin lay his head down in Brian’s lap.

“Nah, I don’t think so,” Justin said. “College is just expensive, you know? And she didn’t sell as many houses when Jack was sick.”

Brian nodded again, and stroked Justin’s hair softly. Then he twined his hand through the hair and massaged Justin’s scalp, which made him hum appreciatively.

“Do you need any help packing?” Brian asked.

Justin shook his head. “Most of my stuff is still there in storage.”

“Well, I guess there’s only one thing to do, then,” Brian said.

“What’s that?” Justin asked, with a knowing grin.

“Pack up the shit coffee maker that doesn’t work and take it to the post office--”

Brian got cut off because Justin attacked his ribs and started tickling. So Brian caught both of Justin’s hands and pinned them above his head, shifting around so that Justin was lying on his back on the couch and Brian was stretched out over him.

“I’ll give you a farewell fuck you’ll never forget,” Brian promised, leaning in close to Justin’s face.

“Yeah?” Justin said, licking his lips.

Brian nodded. “You’ll be with those guys at college,” he paused to lick along Justin’s chin, feeling the stubble against his tongue, “and you’ll be thinking--‘no one has a cock like Brian’s.’”

Justin hissed. “I always think that,” he said.

“Good,” Brian said, turning his attention to the rim of Justin’s ear.

* * *

On Friday, Brian arrived at Daphne’s place just in time to see Justin loading his luggage into Jennifer’s trunk.

Brian handed Justin a small brown paper bag. “You left this at my place,” he said. “Open it later,” he warned quietly.

Justin nodded understandingly and tucked it carefully into one of his suitcases.

Brian stood around and had a cigarette while Daphne said her tearful goodbyes and Jennifer got her keys out of her purse.

Finally, Justin was about to get into the car. Brian came up to him again. “Call me when you get there,” he said, “so that I know your plane hasn’t exploded or anything.”

Justin grinned. “Yeah, sure,” he laughed, and moved to get into the car, but Brian caught him up in a hug, first. It felt weird to hug Justin with his girlfriend and his mother watching from two feet away, but he squeezed him tight and tried to ignore the stirring in his cock at the scent of Justin’s shampoo.

Brian let go, and stepped back. “Later,” he said.

“Later,” Justin agreed, and then the car door closed behind him.

* * *

Two weeks later, Brian got declared “Ad-man of the Year,” and he got a nice little trophy as a prize, and he thought about calling Justin to tell him, but he didn’t. When Justin emailed him a note saying, “Thanks for the condoms,” Brian grinned at his computer screen and suddenly had a brilliant idea for his latest campaign.

That same week, Michael told Brian nervously that he was moving to Portland with his husband, and Brian just sort of nodded.

The next week he went to a job interview in New York, and he sent Justin a postcard.

“Who’s it for?” the guy who was showing him around asked, when he paused to look at some postcards on a rack.

“Huh?” Brian said. “Oh, my kid brother.”

* * *

Postcards were the easiest way to keep in touch because there was no possibility of the kid talking back. But one evening, Brian called Justin on the phone. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” Justin said. “Is something wrong?”

“No,” Brian said, sitting down on a stool and leaning his elbows on the loft counter.

“Oh,” Justin said. “Why are you calling?”

“I just wanted to make sure you were doing your homework and going to bed on time--why do you think I was calling?”

“Uhm,” Justin said. “You want to have phone sex?” The kid sounded genuinely confused.

Brian sighed and rubbed his eyebrows with his left hand. “Deb and Vic left for Italy today.”

“Ooh,” Justin said, his tone becoming understanding. “And Vic’s only got a one-way ticket, huh?” He paused. “Did you take them to the airport?”

“Well, who else would do it?” Brian asked, and it was true, now that Michael was off in Wisconsin or where-the-fuck-ever there was no one around to do the things that a gay man needed to do.

“Was it hard?” Justin asked. “To say goodbye, I mean.”

“No regrets,” Brian said firmly.

“That’s not what I asked,” Justin said, softly reprimanding.

There was silence on the line for a while.

“Sometimes I wish that I had said things to Jack before he died,” Justin said.

That made Brian angry. “Don’t even waste your time thinking about that bastard,” he said. “And it’s a good thing you didn’t say anything else to him, you’d’ve ended up dead.”

“I know,” Justin agreed with a sigh. “But you know, sometimes you can’t help but think, ‘what if?’ right?”

And Brian stared down at the job proposal he had laid out on the counter, and thought, what if.

* * *

Brian could almost convince himself that he was only going because of the job. It was a fantastic offer, just as good as the one he’d gotten in New York except they’d thrown in an office with giant windows overlooking the lake as well. And there’d be lots of hot guys in Chicago for sure, new ones that he hadn’t fucked before.

Gracy was thrilled when Brian called to accept the offer, and offered to arrange for a hotel for Brian to stay in for a few days until the place he was leasing was going to be ready. “Unless you’ve got family or something you want to stay with,” Gracy said.

“No family in Chicago,” Brian said easily. “A hotel would be great, thanks.”

And Gracy had his secretary set it up, and after a few days, Brian moved into his new place, which was on the forty-seventh floor. When the wind blew strong he could see the water slosh in the toilet. Brian didn’t spend real much time staring at the toilet, though--he seemed to have left the drunken benders behind in the Pitts. He preferred the view out his window, staring down at the streets below and the cars that looked like children’s toys.

He went out, and he kept expecting to see the kid, kept seeing blonds in the corner of his eyes and turning to look twice. But he didn’t see him for a couple weeks, though he heard some about him from the gay grapevine, and it was all very flattering.

Brian saw the clubs, had a few drinks, and fucked a few guys, starting his own rumors on the grapevine that there was a guy out there whose fucks would make you see the face of God.

And when Brian didn’t see the kid in the clubs, he began venturing closer, checking out coffee shops near the campus, wandering around art galleries on Sunday afternoons, listening for a certain laugh and watching for a certain smile.

* * *

It was the beginning of October, on a Saturday afternoon, when Brian went over to the campus, following the address he had written in Jennifer’s handwriting on a small note card. The dorm smelled like dirty socks and the room door had a crooked sign reading “Justin and Eric” on it.

He knocked.

THE END


End file.
